WebSG: Social Media and the Old Economy

Boy, I’m conferenced-out. Knackered. Attended the iX Conference and the breadth of information, while not exhaustive of everything new media, was exhausting.

Jeremiah Owyang’s talk at the Academic Forum has been well chronicled by Walter and Kevin even has the video feed of the whole forum, which was captured and broadcast in real time. The chat room backchannel at the conference had quite a strong representation of new media cheerleaders, with many messages like “that’s so cool!” and “he’s so great!”.

Even when he said corporate websites were becoming irrelevant.

Maybe I’m tired, but my pom-poms aren’t as quick to rise these days. It doesn’t help that I’m a good decade older than many of them and have an extremely demanding day job. So in my flu-inspired cynicism, allow me to play devil’s advocate a little bit, as we explore whether social media / new media / web 2.0 / the democratisation of the medium has indeed broken the rules of the old economy.

My grasp of economics is extremely shallow, but a short printout I read in my teens while at the photocopier’s sums it up pretty well:

Cheap and good not fast
Cheap and fast not good
Fast and good not cheap

New media seems to contradict this.

There is a mad race to publish first. Even now as I’m typing this, less than 24 hours after the iX Conference has ended, there are probably more than 2 dozen blog posts already out there, most of them written on the very same day. SgEntrepreneurs.com even had a minute-to-minute update. In the history of mankind, information timeliness has never had to occupy so small a window of time.

Readers and viewers expect information to be free. The Straits Times shut out the majority of readers when they went for a subscription model and have only recently made some of their articles free. In my opinion, they have suffered a tremendous loss not only in readership, but authority. Making good content accessible (read: free) is essential to reach. Online readers are extremely price sensitive. Even registration, which costs time, are a big turn-off. Control of the medium has shifted, and online citizens are not afraid to flaunt it as alternative sources of information are abundant.

Quality is probably where online readers would give the most leeway. Youtube videos are hardly what you would call broadcast quality. A lot has been said about how readers no longer want information encased in corporate-speak. This isn’t to say that readers are tolerant of lousy or inaccurate information. But traditional PR folks have always overcompensated in this area, worrying about page margins, the use of Queen’s english and how every single word is phrased.

Online readers have different priorities.

They hate dishonesty. When you open your information to the world, do this in the knowledge that there are people out there smarter than you. Your audience isn’t stupid. You might think you’re clever to log into the system as 2 different people in order to stir up a conversation, but you will get caught. See the case of Xiaxue impersonating as Xialanxue, her arch-nemesis (how’s that for drama). Being totally transparent is important. The Walmart Edelman saga showed the world that enthusiasm is created, not bought.

They hate censorship. Community management will be a mainstream career path. If you run a major site that invites user feedback, you have the task of moderating input without making it obvious that input is being moderated. Just like reality television shows, anything that attracts the population at large has a tendency to descend to suit the lowest denominator. This may not be the crowd you want to associate with. Comments that do not contribute, as well as comment spam, needs to be manually weeded out. A clear set of moderation guidelines needs to be clear to all users. When in doubt, let the community decide. Social media giant Digg originally obeyed a cease-and-desist to remove user-submitted links containing some code, but later relented when Digg users ran amok and threatened to bombard the site with an endless stream of user input. It is wise to prepare for these scenarios, though you’d most probably be caught unawares anyway.

Who’d have thought Digg users would turn their back on rock star Kevin Rose and gang?

So in conclusion, it is a culture shift that we desperately need. We need this more than cooler tools or faster broadband (though they won’t hurt). Corporations, and especially government agencies, need to understand that speed, cost and quality of information has been redefined by the online medium.

Realign please.