I was asked by a colleague (in housing, hence the housing references below) for a briefing on social media. I jotted some notes down and I thought I’d share them with you. And gather any comments you may have.

- Everyone is talking about it (and journalists love it)

In particular, journalists love twitter of course because it gives them easy access to stories across the globe. Of course just because journalists like it, that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

- It is changing the way people communicate and this will have implications for the way people do business

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that social media is going to be as pervasive and ubiquitous as e-mail. It’s not a question of whether we use social media but how and when.

- There are real business risks associated with the technology

- There are real business opportunities associated with the technology

- There is no firm definition

but I think most people would probably agree that it describes something like

Where content means text, images, audio, video, the technology relies on the the Internet, and the communities are formed on-line.

- It includes tools such as facebook, WordPress, twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or flickr (the list goes on and on) which vary considerably in their structure and approach.

At one end of the social media spectrum are tools geared around a small number of people generating content and a larger group of people commenting on the content.

At the other end are systems designed to facilitate interaction between peers.

There are also tools designed to facilitate collaboration (wikis being the most widespread but there are others such as the Google Wave platform)

Like all tools people use social media for a range of purposes (for example, some people publish information on blogs but don’t allow any comments, some people use flickr as an on-line photo store rather than for networking).

It also, and perhaps more crucially, describes an on-line culture where sharing and critiquing information and content is emphasised. The tools may come and go (Friendster anyone?) but the culture is becoming increasingly embedded.

- It is quite widespread

There are 22 million users of facebook aged 18+ in the UK. Facebook is the most popular social media tool but several others are very well used.

- It is used as a form of networking, to keep people in touch with each other, to make new friends and to have discussions and arguments. Or to play interminable games involving farms.

- And to spread news and ideas or jokes and to influence people

- It’s used as a form of protest and to build momentum around protests

- Or just as a form of self expression

- And it is generally accepted that social media is an important part of the marketing and customer relations mix for many, if not most, organisations and companies.

Well, it’s possible that many of them don’t make that much money at the moment.

Essentially the primary route to making money for all of these tools is to understand how the networks they facilitate work and then to sell this knowledge, usually to advertsisers (facebook already provides very detailed targeting of adverts) but other organisations are interested: search engines pay Twitter for access to its database for example.

There are supplementary ways to make money, such as the “freemium” model where tools offer some functions for free and charge for others. Flickr is an example of this model.

- Social media makes its users much more public than we are used to in society

Consequently there are privacy concerns in general and organisations run increased risks of reputational damage as a result of things that its employees, volunteers and contractors do on-line.

- Social media means that the consequence of poor customer service can more easily become a reputational issue.

Musician Dave Carroll was unhappy with the way United Airlines handled his complaint that they had broken his guitars in transit. He wrote a song “United Breaks Guitars”, made a video and uploaded it to YouTube. As of today it has been viewed 8.5 million times. I think it is fair to say that United Airlines would probably prefer that this video were not quite so popular.

- Social media is becoming pervasive

Many organisations block access to social media tools citing security and bandwidth concerns. This is not sustainable. A local authority of my acquaintance released a viral video in 2009 designed to raise awareness of the Xmas bin collection times. Because the council blocks access to YouTube it had to be distributed on a separate platform internally which prevented the several thousand employees easily sharing the video with their friends and family.

- The culture around making links on social media tools is not well developed.

For example should housing officers be friends with their tenants? should they never be friends with their tenants? under what circumstances should they “un-friend” people they have a professional relationship with.

There are strategic issues around the degree to which an organisation wants to encourage its customers and staff to use social media which need careful consideration. A Housing Association could say “we’ll start to use social media when the tenants ask for it” or they could say “we think that there are real benefits to this technologies so we will support our tenants to get on-line and to use these new social media tools”

- Policies and procedures need to be carefully established

Organisations need to consider whether some roles will be obliged to use social media (perhaps the Chair or Chief Executive should be obliged to use a blog or the customer services team to manage a twitter account).

They also need to consider the training requirements within their organisations, it’s not just about the use of the tools but also about the creation of content, and the rules around commenting and critiquing others.

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