Younger people have their own information gathering patterns

New research commissioned by Forbes Advisor tells us that 24% of younger people use social media instead of traditional search engines to find things online. Other recent studies, including some that aren’t US-focused like that one, have said the same. Google even flagged this trend two years ago.

While this latest research tells us a lot about what is happening, it doesn’t dive into why this is happening. So here’s my two cents on the matter.

I think there are three trends at play here.

1. Each new generation breaks from the information gathering patterns of previous generations

When some people read the headline ‘Is Social Media The New Google? Gen Z Turn To Google 25% Less Than Gen X When Searching’ their first thought is that the younger generations are “doing it wrong”.

I disagree. I think all generations break from the information patterns created or established by older generations. This is particularly true on the internet, where things change very quickly.

I’ve been on the internet for a very long time so I’ve seen the same hand-wringing about (then) youngsters doing things wrong when people started getting most of their news and information from:

  • blogs instead of newspapers,

  • then social media instead of blogs,

  • then micro-blogs (like Twitter) instead of more established social media (like Facebook),

  • then news aggregators (like Apple/Google News) instead of official news media apps or websites,

  • then closed networks (like WhatsApp and Discord) instead of more open ones (like YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit), and

  • now TikTok instead of YouTube or search engines.

This has happened before. And it will happen again whenever a new, hot technology is ready to be embraced by the next generation.

2. The commercialisation of the web

Other than Wikipedia, the majority of news and information gathering sites on the web are commercial in nature. As a result, many of them will:

  • use clickbait headlines,

  • publish junk articles,

  • run low quality ads,

  • host poorly disguised sponsored content, and

  • not keep their editorial arm separate from their advertising arm (if those two arms were ever separate in the first place).

Young people see this and they don’t trust the organisations that do it.

There is also So Much Crap out there. Do some research about, say, which air fryer to buy and you’ll have to wade through a dozen highly SEO-optimised and commercialised best-of lists. And by ‘commercialised’ I mean the list-makers will have taken ad money from brands for inclusion or a higher ranking in those lists.

It’s no wonder people are turning towards first-hand knowledge sharing and more personal recommendations from real people on platforms like TikTok.

And yes, many of those TikTokkers won’t declare their biases or sponsor lists, so if you focus too narrowly on just what one group has to say, you’ll end up in an information bubble. But, hey, at least it’ll be a bubble of your own peers and the people you relate to :) But more on breaking out of information bubbles in a minute.

3. The enshittification of Google

Google used to be a great search engine, but it let its advertising arm bully its search arm into jamming more and more ads and sponsored content into the search results, making its crown jewel far less useful than it used to be.

Google also isn’t doing as good a job as it used to against the sheer volume of low quality content the web is now filled with. The irony, of course, is that by making it super easy for anyone to host automated Google Ads on their website, Google itself enabled (and continues to enable) the existence of all this junk web content. Now if Google wants to make lots of money through its Ads business, it has to keep directing people to the crappy websites on which its own ads are running.

The end result is that Google makes tonnes of money while we get low quality search results. So it makes sense why people (especially younger people) are trusting big tech companies less and less over time.

Word of mouth always wins

Given those three trends, you can see why a good proportion of younger people the trust results and recommendations they get from their peers and influencers more than what they get from other sources. And since more of their peers and influencers are currently on TikTok, that’s where they’re going to find the information they seek.

(Even the older generations that primarily use Google for their search needs understand the power of personal, word-of-mouth recommendations. That’s why so many of them include the search parameter “site:reddit.com” in their queries because they know they’ll get much more trustworthy and far less commercially-biased results from forums like Reddit.)

Will this trend away from search engines continue? Where will we go from here? I don’t know. But what I do know is that (a) nothing ever dies completely and (b) patterns are cyclical. Take radio, for example. It didn’t die off when television was introduced. Younger people listen to a lot less radio than older people do, of course, but it still has a place in our information ecosystem. And over the years parts of it have even made a comeback in the form of podcasts, which a good proportion of younger people do listen to.

So while youngsters might continue to move away from large, generic search engines like Google for their information gathering needs, it’s not like those search engines will ever go away. The balance will shift, the flow of advertising money will adjust, and a new equilibrium will be reached.

You can’t do any of this without good media literacy

The one thing that will never change is the need for continuously-updated media literacy for all generations. Without that you won’t know if what you’re reading or learning about is accurate – or at least accurate enough for your purposes.

Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to look a little wider and find a whole range of voices on a particular topic. And if you’re online for long enough and you’re even halfway decent at spotting patterns, you’ll learn about people’s biases (commercial or otherwise) relatively quickly. There was even a meme on Tumblr about this a few years ago that went something like: “me, sitting on my Casper Mattress, eating my Hello Fresh meal, using NordVPN to connect to my Better Help therapy session” :)

Media literacy goes a long way in helping people form an informed opinion (or at least a slightly less uninformed one) on how much to trust each of their information sources. Basically, it doesn’t matter where we get our information from, as long as we all keep our ‘bullshit meter’ plugged into our information gathering chain.

Responding to bad faith comments on social media

There are five main ways to respond to bad faith comments on social media. Depending on the situation you’re in, you’ll need to take one or more of these approaches:

  1. Ignore

  2. Engage

  3. Argue

  4. Smack down

  5. Peel away

Why am I writing about this now?

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a bunch of people do a less than impressive job at handling bad faith comments on multiple social networks.

I’ve been participating in (and later managing) online communities for over twenty-five years now. So I figured I should share this list of tried-and-tested approaches because less experienced folks might find it useful.

1. Ignore

You can’t ignore bad faith comments, especially in smaller communities and especially if it’s the first comment on a post. If you do, you risk people thinking the commenter’s assertions are the majority view. So you have to publicly challenge what they’ve said, and ideally as quickly as possible.

The only time you ignore bad faith comments is when the bad faith commenter goes on and on, and you know that all they’re trying to do is waste your time. So, if you can’t block or ban them, you have to ignore them.

(Don’t feel that when you’re ignoring bad faith comments you’re taking a passive approach to the situation, by the way. The whole point of bad faith comments is to muddy the waters of the discussion and to waste people’s time. By ignoring their repeated comments, you’re actively not doing what the bad faith commenter wants you to do. This is a good thing!)

2. Engage

If you earnestly engage in bad-faith comments, then the bad-faith commenter has ‘won’. That’s because their whole point was to waste your time.

That said, your first response should probably be an earnest reply. This is just to verify the bad-faithedness of the original comment. Sometimes people aren’t good at expressing themselves online. If you start by responding openly you can check if they meant well but spoke poorly.

3. Argue

You only argue with bad-faith commenters if you have the time and if you enjoy doing so. Trolls and shit-posters live for this kind of thing. (Absurdist shitposting on bad faith comments is probably my favourite approach.)

4. Smack down

If done right, a smack-down response will end the conversation from your end. Any subsequent reply from the original commenter will just make them look worse.

It is important, though, that you stop responding after you’ve delivered you smack down. You have dropped the mic; you should not pick it up again.

Also, a smack down doesn’t have to be an angry or antagonistic retort. You can be funny, wry, sarcastic, indignant, or something else entirely. You just have to say something that will make any subsequent replies from the bad faith commenter look whiny and slightly desperate for attention.

A word of warning though: smack downs do tend to make bad faith commenters angry, so be prepared for them to lash out or worse. People have been doxxed when trying to smack down bad faith commenters online.

Woman typing on a MacBook

Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

5. Peel away

The ‘peel away’ approach takes time and finesse but is fun. You basically keep asking the bad faith commenter to explain why they’re saying what they’re saying. Once you’ve peeled off enough layers, the absurdity of their argument becomes apparent to everyone.

(This is also a good approach for when people make sexist and racist jokes. You can always respond to those with “wait, why is that funny?” and take it from there.)

This is not the easiest approach to take though. It takes time and it has the potential to go off the rails. So maybe leave it for seasoned community members and managers to execute.

Pomeranian working on an iPad

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

Which approach do I take?

My first response is usually an earnest one, especially if this is first time I’m hearing from someone who I don’t know.

Then, based in the response to that — and on how much time I want to dedicate to this discussion — I either go the smack-down or the peel-away route.

After that I ignore all further responses from the bad faith commenter.

I do continue to respond to other comments on the post, by the way. And I have had cases in which a bad faith commenter has chased me around the rest of the comment thread trying to get me to engage with them again. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I find it super easy to ignore people like that :)

Do you have a preferred approach?

What do you think of my list? Those might be the fine mains approaches, but there are several others. What’s worked for you in the past?

And what’s the first thing you do when you see a bad faith comment?

Let me know.

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 7

Contents (tl;dr)

  1. Keep it easy

  2. Keep it short

  3. Use photos and videos

  4. Use numbers

  5. Share emotion

  6. Post quickly

  7. Give people a reason to care < you are here

7. Give people a reason to care

You can follow all the advice I’ve given in parts 1-6 of this series and still not have a successful post if you audience doesn’t care about what you’re saying to them.

Don’t post content that isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience

Your audience won’t engage with your content if they can’t tell what’s in it for them.

Good content is at least one of these things: cool, interesting, or useful.

Importantly, this isn’t what you find cool, interesting, or useful, it’s what you audience finds cool, interesting, or useful.

Here are few ways in which you can achieve this.

Use a better photo

We wanted to publish a post about a bunch of engineering students who visited one of our tunnels during a routine maintenance closure.

Civil #Engineering students from @UQ_EAIT get a behind-the-scenes tour during a tunnel closure on Legacy Way in Brisbane. #maintenance #UQ #partnership @UQ_News

We were sent several photos to choose from. This one didn’t match the story we were trying to tell:

Photo of four people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in an interior space with white panels on the wall in the background. Three of the people are facing a fourth, who is talking to them.

While this one did:

Photo of five people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing inside a long underground road tunnel that continues around a curve. They are all looking up, above the white wall panels that run the length of the tunnel.

The second photo works better because it’s a wide shot. And, as we learned in part 3 of this series (‘use photos and videos’), you should use wide shots when you’re trying to show context or the space that the subjects of your photo are in. Showing the tunnel is important to the story we’re trying to tell here, so the wide shot is the one to go with. Basically, that second photo is both cool (people walking in a tunnel almost no one gets to walk through) and interesting (engineering students get an idea of what they’ll experience).

Show stuff people don’t normally see

People don’t normally get to see things from the point of view of a ground handler at an airport. So, when they do, it’s cool.

Last night flight NZ288 arrived safely in New Zealand, carrying critical medical supplies. Thank you to our cargo teams and partners for keeping our country safe and stocked up during this challenging time

Photo of two airport ground handlers offloading cargo from an Air New Zealand aircraft at night. The cargo is a big pile of white, wrapped boxes that is being held together by a net.

People also rarely get to see what happens behind the scenes at major infrastructure projects. So, for those who are into engineering, this photo is both interesting and potentially cool.

Five of the new 630kW ventilation fans which will keep the air moving through the #NorthConnex tunnels when they open in 2020. #BigFans

Photo of two people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a huge underground space with five massive silver coloured fans along one side. Each fan is about the height of three adult humans.

Give people a reason to care

Sometimes the best way to tell a bigger story is by focusing on something small.

Here is the first of two posts published by Boral during National Road Safety Week a couple of years ago.

As part of our #RoadSafetyWeek activities, Boral drivers and representatives from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator attended a breakfast at our Logistics Depot in Wacol, Queensland to discuss the importance of road safety, safe on road practises and the responsibility we share as road users.

Photo of three dozen people wearing yellow or orange high visibility vests. They are standing in three long lines inside a massive warehouse facility. Behind them are two large yellow trucks, one a cement truck and one a liquified gas transport truck. The name ‘Boral’ is written in large, green, all-capital letters around the barrel of the cement truck. The people are all looking up towards the photographer, who is standing on a railing high above the warehouse floor.

The post has a decent photo: a wide shot that shows the scale of their equipment and the warehouse they’re standing in. But do you care about what they’ve written in the text? It’s nice that they had that breakfast in which they talked about road safety, of course, but that’s not particularly cool, interesting, or useful to me.

Compare that to this second post.

“Safety is paramount in this job, not only for me but for everyone on the road. I have a young family so I want to ensure that I am safe on the road so that I can go home to them. The training that we receive at Boral creates safe driving habits, which I am grateful for.” Peter, Boral Driver

Photo of a man, evidently a truck driver, wearing blue pants with a reflective strip and an orange-and-blue long sleeved shirt. He has one hand on his hip and has placed his other hand possessively on the large yellow truck next to him. The truck is pulling two large containers. The containers are painted yellow and green, and they have the company name ‘Boral’ written on them in large, all-capital letters. The man is smiling at the photographer.

That post also has a good photo, and this time they manage to show the scale of their equipment with a narrow shot. But, because they’ve made it personal, this post works better than the first one. If you’re a driver who shares the road with truckers, they you would appreciate that they get training on safe driving habits. Because this post makes road safety personal, it’s much more interesting than the first one.

Tell people something useful, but do it quickly

In part 2 of this series (‘keep it short’) I talked about how three of the videos we posted easily outperformed the others. Those three videos not only conveyed useful information, they did so in a very short amount of time. In fact, the longest was just sixteen seconds.

Also, we showed the audience a striking, dramatic, or unusual scene within the first three seconds of each video (as shown in the screenshots below). This caught our audience’s eye and got them to watch the videos most of the way through.

Three square-cropped screenshots of videos. The first screenshot, captioned ‘Tunnel safety’, shows an SUV driving through a tunnel with bright sparks flying out from one of its rear tyres. The second screenshot, captioned ‘Incident response’, shows the point-of-view of a motorcycle rider speeding along a congested road. There is a ‘fast forward’ icon above the video, suggesting it has been spend-up. The third screenshot, captioned ‘Road safety’, shows the close-circuit camera view of an eight-lane highway (four lanes each way, with a cement divider between them). There are cars and trucks driving up and down this highway.

So, don’t just try to be useful, try to be quick about it too.

Show stuff that’s just cool

Sometimes you don’t need to have a particularly interesting or useful message to share. Sometimes all you need is a cool photo.

Hope you’re not scared of heights! Grate photo from one of our engineers from inside the Burnley Tunnel’s air supply shaft. #50mUnderground #RegularInspection #LongWayDown #WorkingFromHeights

Photo of a tall, vertical maintenance shaft below someone’s feet, as seen through a large industrial grate. All you can see of the photographer are the cuffs of their blue work pants and their brown, steel-toed work boots. Running vertically down the length of the shaft (below the photographers feet) are several pipes and cables.

Though, if you can add a message to your photo, it’ll make your post even cooler. (And like I said in part 2 of this series, before-and-after photos tend to perform better than average.)

Around 900,000m3 and counting – NorthConnex is closing in on its goal to put 1 million m3 of spoil into Hornsby Quarry

Collage of two photos, both showing a large mining quarry with trees and brush growing along its sides. The photo on the left is labelled ‘February 2017’ and shows a pool of water at the bottom of the deeply-mined quarry. The photo on the right is labelled ‘August 2018’ and shows the quarry almost completely filled with soil that is lighter coloured than its surroundings.

Give people a reason to care: recap

Let’s recap how you can give people a reason to care about what you’re saying:

  • Only post content your audience will care about: don’t post content that isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience

  • If you have a choice of which photo to use, pick the one that tells the best story

  • As someone who works for a business you probably have access to things other people might not even know exists, so make the most of it: show stuff people don’t normally see

  • To tell a big story sometimes you need to focus on something specific and small: by making things personal you give people a reason to care

  • Share content that makes your audience want to keep coming back for more: tell people something useful (but do it quickly)

  • You don’t have to have a strong message in all your posts: sometimes you can just show stuff that’s cool

To sum it all up

Use these seven principles like a checklist:

  1. Keep it easy

  2. Keep it short

  3. Use photos and videos

  4. Use numbers

  5. Share emotion

  6. Post quickly

  7. Give people a reason to care

And if your post isn’t at least:

  • cool,

  • interesting, or

  • useful

then I don’t think you should post it at all.

Don’t post bad content

The final bit of guidance I have for you is this: bad content is worse than no content.

If your content isn’t cool, interesting, or useful to your audience then it is bad and you should not share it.

If you post too much bad content:

  • your audience will stop following you and

  • the social networks you’re posting this on will stop showing your content to your followers.

But if your content is worth your audience’s time and attention, they’ll keep coming back for more.

Close the loop with analytics

Once you’ve posted your content, you need to see if it’s resonating with your audience. Use digital and social media analytics to see how it’s performing. Then give your audience more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

Don’t just stop posting stuff that doesn’t resonate widely with your audience, though. There are likely things you need to say that, while not the most engaging, are still important to have said. And sometimes what you say only needs to resonate with a narrow segment of your audience for it to be considered successful.

Go forth and post great content

That all the guidance I have for now.

Let me know if you have any questions. Get in touch:

  • in the comments section below,

  • via this website’s ‘Contact’ page,

  • or DM me on Twitter (@ameel) or LinkedIn (ameelkhan).

Also, let me know if you found this guidance useful and if it helped you improve the reach and engagement on your content.

In the meantime, happy posting!

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 6

6. Post quickly

On social media things happen now.

Post things on the day of the event

People online do engage with events and situations that happened a few days ago, but most of the engagement on social media is live and in the moment.

Here’s a LinkedIn post that someone posted on a Tuesday:

On Saturday I ran a mini design thinking virtual workshop with an amazing group of young people from multicultural backgrounds about how COVID-19 and staying at home is affecting their daily life and connections.

Throughout the workshop, mental health was chosen as the major challenge facing multicultural youth during this period.

<post continues for another couple of paragraphs>

The topic of this post is fine, it’s just that if they’d posted this on Saturday it would likely have had more of an impact.

Compare that to this post from a cabin crew member just a couple of hours after their flight touched down:

Back home from a 23-hour duty, there and back to Delhi with some amazing colleagues. We brought back some very grateful UK citizens who had been stranded for weeks.

I’m so proud of everybody involved in making this and all our other repatriation flights happen, especially my incredible team of customer service managers and cabin crew who are always smiling whatever the challenge 😊

#ba #britishairways #repatriation #proud #cabincrew #teamwork

You can almost feel the emotional high this person is on because they’re posting about it so soon after the event.

Two things happen when you post during or shortly after an event:

  1. The feelings and emotions you had (or are having) tend to get reflected in what you post, which is great

  2. You have a much better chance of being part of the conversation that’s happening about this event right now

Post quickly: recap

Let’s recap why you should post quickly:

  • Things on social media happen in the moment, so don’t miss the opportunity to be a part of that: post things on the day of the event

Next in the series

On to ‘Give people a reason to care’…

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 5

5. Share emotion

If you want your web and social media posts to perform well, they have to sound like they’re a person talking to a another person.

Talk like a person, not like a business

Look at this tweet from Roads Australia:

Our CEO, Michael Kilgariff, visited the @WestGateTunnel site this week. Standing by the ramp site for the Tunnel Boring Machine are Construction Manager - Tunnels Andrew Shepherd, Transurban’s Anita Orr, Michael, and Transurban’s Camden Gilchrist. #Transurban

Photo showing four people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a line in front of a large dug up area that looks like a construction site with large metal support structures.

That doesn’t read like a person talking to another person. It reads like a company trying to talk to a person. In fact, that text is more like a caption on a photo than a story being told about the visit these people took to that construction site.

Compare this to an almost identical tweet from Infrastructure Partnerships Australia:

Ever seen a tunnel boring machine being constructed? We did, thanks to @TransurbanGroup giving us a backstage pass to its Northern portal dive site for the @WestGateTunnel. This event is part of our new network series #MembereXperience.

Photo showing twelve people wearing orange high visibility vests and white hard hats. They are standing in a group in front of what looks like an industrial area. Behind them are stacks of large shipping containers.

Now that sounds more like a person talking to a person. The photo itself isn’t great, but at least the text tells the story.

Actually, those folks went one better: their tweet included multiple photos so you got a better idea of what the visitors did and saw while they were there.

How do you write posts like this? Pretend you’re telling this story to someone from another business at a networking event. And if the story you’re telling isn’t boring, that level of informal storytelling should also let some of your emotions come through in the text.

All that said, please don’t take and share photos of people standing in a group like in the two big photos above. These types of photos don’t tell the reader anything about the experience the people had at that event or location. And most readers won’t know – and, importantly, won’t care – about who the people in that photo are. Posts with photos like this are almost always bad and you should not share them.

Use hashtags to share emotion

Sometimes it takes the smallest change to make an otherwise good post work better. Here’s an example from WorkSafe Victoria on LinkedIn:

Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. Most employers already know that mental health in the workplace is important, but the challenge is knowing where to start and what information to rely on.

<link to their website with relevant resources>

Now that post is good, but I think it could be improved significantly by adding a single hashtag:

Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay. Most employers already know that mental health in the workplace is important, but the challenge is knowing where to start and what information to rely on. #TakeCareOfYourPeople

<link to their website with relevant resources>

See how much of a difference adding just a little bit of emotion makes? Try to do that with your posts.

Proficient users of hashtags can tell a whole second story (sometimes a behind-the-scenes anecdote, sometimes even an entire emotional arc) by adding just a couple of hashtags to their posts

Beware the Facebook algorithm

Most social media platforms will use an algorithm to decide which posts to show to which users, and in what sequence. It’s important to remember that these algorithms tend to follow community stereotypes.

For example, the business I work for posted this ad on Facebook about child car seat safety:

Screenshot of a Facebook sponsored post (ie ad) by Transurban. The text of the post reads “Nearly half of us use child car seats incorrectly, according to research by our road safety partner NeuRA - Neuroscience Research Australia. This increases the risk of injury to children by almost three times. Follow this checklist to ensure your child restraint is installed correctly in your car.” Included in this post is a video, the thumbnail of which shows, side-by-side, the correct and incorrect way in which to connect a car seat tether strap to an anchorage point.

Since we’re an infrastructure/engineering/technology business, Facebook’s algorithm decided that it would show this post mostly to men. When I looked at the stats, I found that only 8% of the people Facebook showed this post to were women. This is despite the fact that over 40% of our Facebook page’s followers are women.

We had to work against Facebook’s algorithm to show our post to equal numbers of men and women. To do that we published two identical ad posts: one targeted at just men, one targeted at just women; and then we put twice as much money behind the ad targeted to women. It was only then that our eventual impressions numbers were roughly equal.

So make sure your post is reaching the audience that it will resonate with the most. And remember that you may have to fight algorithms and community stereotypes to achieve this objective.

Share emotion: recap

Let’s recap how you can share emotion in your posts:

  • Write your posts like you’re talking to a colleague at a networking event: talk like a person, not like a business

  • If you can’t add emotion directly, try adding it indirectly: use hashtags to share emotion

  • Make sure your posts are reaching the audiences that it will resonate with the most: beware the Facebook algorithm

Just keep in mind that adding genuine emotion to your posts (and not just a random exclamation marks or emoji here and there) is a skill that will take time and practice to develop.

Next in the series

On to ‘Post quickly’…

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 4

4. Use numbers

While photos and videos help your message stand out, numbers ground your message and make it more relatable.

Numbers make things more real

Take this post of BHP announcing the renewal of a partnership:

BHP Olympic Dam today announced the renewal of its partnership with the Royal Flying Doctor Service Central Operations (serving SA/NT).

BHP’s contribution will help the RFDS to provide its life-saving service to South Australian communities, many of which are in rural and remote areas.

That’s a nice message, but it’s only when they mention a number does the scope of their partnership become more real:

BHP Olympic Dam today announced the renewal of its partnership with the Royal Flying Doctor Service Central Operations (serving SA/NT), worth $300,000 over the next three years.

BHP’s contribution will help the RFDS to provide its life-saving service to South Australian communities, many of which are in rural and remote areas.

Use numbers whenever you can (assuming it’s relevant, of course). Your message will have more weight when you do.

Also, don’t be afraid to use exact numbers. Sometimes being specific with your numbers works better than rounding up or down.

Don’t overwhelm people with numbers, though. Pick your most relevant and most powerful couple of numbers and talk about those.

Numbers help contextualise things

Numbers also help contextualise things. Take this post from my workplace.

We’re extending our incident response motorcycle trial in Qld. Since the trial started on the Gateway and Logan motorways 6 months ago, the team have responded to more than 150 incidents #RoadSafetyWeek #GRSW

Now that’s a good message, and the 150 incidents is a nice number. But adding more numbers –importantly, adding numbers that people understand and can relate to – helps tell the story much better.

We’re extending our incident response motorcycle trial in Qld. Since the trial started on the Gateway and Logan motorways 6 months ago, the team have responded to more than 150 incidents, arriving 2 mins sooner and clearing the incident around 8 mins faster #RoadSafetyWeek #GRSW

I probably have no idea if 150 incidents in six months is low, average, or high, but I do understand what it means for help to arrive two minutes sooner and for traffic blockages to be cleared eight minutes quicker. The new numbers are more relatable, and they help add more context to the story.

Use numbers: recap

Let’s recap how you can use numbers in your stories:

  • Numbers make things more real: they help explain the scope and scale of your story

  • Numbers help contextualise things: relatable numbers make your message easier to understand

  • So, wherever it makes sense, try to add numbers to your story.

Next in the series

On to ‘Share emotion’…

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 3

3. Use photos and videos

Text-only posts are nice, but they’re not particularly eye catching.

Without a photo most corporate posts are just ‘meh’

Take this post we published a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team at our Motorway Control Centre are always there to make sure you have a safe journey home.

During this challenging time our team are always spaced 1.5m apart and working in rostered pairs to make sure we keep everyone safe.

That was a nice message to share, but it was only when you saw the accompanying photo that the post actually become a good one:

Photo of a large control room with high ceilings. The wall at the far end of the room is filled with multiple screens showing status graphics and live CCTV video. The room has several large workstations with sit-stand desks, each with five computer monitors arranged in a semi-circle. There are two people working in the control room and they are at the opposite ends of the room from each other.

Showing is more powerful than telling

You can tell this story…

Mix around 6,000 seedlings, some rays of sunshine and a few drops of water — and you’ll get bush regeneration.

Together with @HornsbyCouncil we’ve been able to bring life back to this section of Beecroft Reserve which runs along the Hills M2 Motorway.

But it’s only when you show that story that it really comes to life:

Photo collage of two photos. The photo on the left shows a dry and brown corridor of land next to a shallow spillway. The photo on the right shows the same corridor now lush with vegetation.

Bonus tip: People love before-and-after shots, the more dramatic the better. If you are creating, building, or changing anything, try to take (and subsequently share) as many before-and-after shots as you can.

Don’t just document, tell a story

Many people take photos just to document what’s going on. Don’t do that.

Use your photos to tell a story about your event or project: share specific details along with your feelings and opinions.

For example, let’s say you attend an in-person conference (remember those from the pre-pandemic days?). The laziest photo you could take at an event like that is something like is (about half of which is just the backs of chairs and people’s heads):

Photo of a large conference room. There are dozens of people seated in chairs facing the stage, and the bottom half of the photo is just the backs of these chairs and the backs of the audience’s heads. On the stage is the speaker, who is standing behind a podium and is talking to the audience. On the wall in front of the audience is a large projector screen showing a slide with the title ‘The Second Curve - planning for an uncertain future’. The rest of the text on the slide is too small to read. [Source: Karen Shuster]

All that photo says is “I attended a conference”.

You photo should say a lot more than that. At the very least it should focus on a subject or it should express an emotion.

Like it could say “the conference was huge”:

Photo of a massive conference room. There are hundreds of people seated in chairs facing the stage, all focused on what the speaker is saying. The speaker is a small figure walking across the stage in the left corner of the photo. [Source: Samuel Periera]

Or “I was a panellist at a talk”:

Close-up photo of a microphone on top on a table, taken from the side of the person who will be speaking into that microphone. In the background, which is out of focus, you can see several dozen audience members facing the speaker, who is evidently a panelist who is seated at the table on the stage. [Source: Ben Rogers]

Or “my talk went really well”:

Photo of a speaker standing with their back to the audience while they take a selfie of themselves with the audience in the background of their photo. [Source: Howard Lake]

Or “the speaker was super engaging”:

Photo of a what appears to be a café in which several people are seated on long tables. All the people are focused on the speaker, who is standing on the opposite side of the room. We can only see the back of the speaker. They are holding a microphone and are gesturing as they speak to the audience. [Source: Cydor]

Or even just “we had a great time”:

Photo of several people seated in the front row of an audience at a talk. They are all dressed professionally and the three closest to the camera are smiling. [Source: Priscilla Du Preez]

Basically, try to figure out what story you want to tell – ie what you see or feel at this event that you want to tell people about – and then take a photo that helps you tell this story.

Match your image with what you’re saying

The type of photo you take needs to match the story you’re trying to tell. So…

Take a wide shot when you want to set the scene or show the scale of your project or event.

Overhead photo of a large event registration space, probably taken from the floor above. Dozens of people are standing around chatting with each other, while some are standing in front of tables to collect their name tags. [Source: Product School]

Take a medium shot when you want to showcase one part of your project or event.

Photo of people in a meeting room. Most people are sitting around a large table with their laptops open in front of them. The far wall that has lots of colourful sticky notes grouped on it. A woman is standing by this wall with her hand raised towards to the sticky notes. Most of the people sitting on the table are looking at her. This appears to be a project planning session. [Source: Leon]

Take a narrow shot when you want to focus on something specific in your story.

Photo of two people seated at a table, both looking at a large computer monitor. The person closest to the camera is using a trackpad and keyboard. [Source: Christina @ wocintechchat.com]

More photo-taking tips

I’ve covered how to take better work-related photos in another series, so check that out for more specific photo-taking advice:

Since I shared this advice with people at work, the quality of photos I’ve received from them has improved drastically. 

Also, if you’re interested, here are a couple of photo editing show-and-tell posts I did on my personal blog that you might also find useful:

Often videos are better than photos

From a communications point of view, photos and videos accomplish different objectives:

  • Photos are good for awareness: they’re easy to understand, and a good photo can almost instantly tell your story.

  • Videos are good for understanding: but only if people watch your video first. Once your video plays, of course, you get the opportunity to tell a more complex or comprehensive story to your audience.

This post about car seat testing, for example, was much more effective with a video than with just a photo:

New research from @neuraustralia has shown a potential safety benefit in using plastic chest clips on child car restraints, reducing the risk of serious injury in a crash #RoadSafety #StaySafe

Watching a video of a crash test is much more effective than just seeing a photo of a car seat strapped onto a crash simulation sled. (We tested this. The video got a lot more engagement.)

Serendipitous videos are even better

Good serendipitous videos from CCTV cameras are always gold. If you use CCTV cameras and have access to video from them, try to mine them for as much content as you can.

Those are some sweet sprinklers in the Burnley Tunnel!

A truck carrying sugar started smoking in the Burnley Tunnel & was quickly spotted by our Traffic Control Room who kicked our deluge system into gear.

Thanks to @MFB_NEWS & @VictoriaPolice for attending to the incident

Always add descriptions to your photos and captions to your videos

Everyone should be able to understand what you’re trying to say.

Add image descriptions or alternative text (alt-text) to your images.

Here are a two useful guides, both of which have good references for additional reading (at the bottom of each page):

Add captions (and, if you can, transcripts) to your videos. There are several automated tools (and even live transcription services) that can do this for you now.

Many videos on the web use open captions (ie text that is burned into the video). But websites like YouTube and Facebook let you upload caption files, so there you can also use closed captions (ie captions that you can turn on and off by clicking the [CC] button).

My recommendation is to add open captions to all your videos. That way you can use the same video on websites and do and don’t support closed captions.

Use photos and videos: recap

Let’s recap how you can tell a better story using photos and videos:

  • Without a photo most corporate posts are just ‘meh’: photos bring a story to life, particularly interesting behind-the-scenes photos that people don’t often get to see

  • Showing is more powerful than telling: you can really drive home your point with a photo

  • Don’t just document, tell a story: share specific details, along with your feelings and opinions

  • Often videos are better than photos: good videos let you explain your story better

  • Serendipitous videos work particularly well: the more unusual or unexpected your video, the more effective it’ll be

  • Always add descriptions to your photos and captions to you videos: everyone should be able to understand what you’re trying to say

Next in the series

On to ‘Use numbers’…

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 2

2. Keep it short

Don’t waste your audience’s time. They will appreciate it if you’re quick and efficient.

No one has time to read blocks of text

You need to keep your content short because:

The shorter you keep you content, the higher the chance it’ll be noticed, skimmed, and actually understood.

Or, to cut a long story short:

Shorter content cuts through.

Hashtags speak (almost) a thousand words

Use hashtags to reduce the amount of text you use.

Here’s a LinkedIn post from Airservices Australia:

We think Air Traffic Controllers have the best job in the world, but don’t take our word for it! We asked some of our staff “What aspect of your role do you enjoy the most?” and this is what they had to say...

#CivilAir #IDATC #AirservicesAustralia #AirTrafficControl #NowRecruiting #aviation #AvGeek

<video in which their air traffic controllers tell us what they love about their jobs>

And here’s how I would’ve rewritten it:

What do we love about OUR jobs, you ask?

#AirTrafficController #BestJobInTheWorld #NowRecruiting #IDATC #aviation #AvGeek

<video in which their air traffic controllers tell us what they love about their jobs>

I got rid of the first sentence (it was small talk) and I front-loaded the post with the most important point (what people like about their jobs). The rest of those two sentences I replaced with two hashtags: #AirTrafficController and #BestJobInTheWorld.  

Get to the point or people will go away

People online are like sharks: they have to keep moving or they die. [1]

  • First sentence isn’t interesting? Skip.

  • Headings don’t make sense? Skip.

  • Big blocks of text? Skip.

  • Have to expand the Instagram post text to figure out what this photo of people standing in a line is about? Skip.

  • Can’t tell in 3 seconds what the video is going to be about? Skip.

  • Need to raise my phone’s volume to watch a video because there are no captions? Skip.

Make your point in under 30 seconds

Getting to your point quickly is particularly important with videos.

Over 2018 and 2019 we had posted several videos on our Facebook page. When I looked carefully at the stats on these videos, the results were confronting:

  • Only 29% of people who saw a post with a video in it actually watched the video itself

  • Only 6% of those viewers watch beyond 30 seconds of the video

Unfortunately, this is typical of videos posted by businesses on social media. The lessons we learned from these stats were:

  • Really give people a reason to engage with your content (ie watch the video)

  • Don’t expect people to watch more than 30 seconds of most of your videos

  • What we did next was create several new videos of different lengths and on different topics. We then posted these as paid posts on Facebook (ie as Facebook ads). With paid posts you get detailed stats on how your videos performed.

Here’s what the stats on those videos said:

Our analysis told us:

  • Most of our videos (the grey lines in the chart above) didn’t perform well. At most 15% of people watched for more than 3 seconds – which is about the time it takes to scroll to the next post in your feed.

  • A bunch of videos did perform significantly better (the three coloured lines in the chart above). These were shorter; covered more interesting topics; and, importantly, had very striking visuals in the first three seconds.

The lessons we learned:

  • Start your videos strongly (striking visuals, arresting music)

  • Say something engaging incredibly quickly, otherwise people will stop watching

  • Get to your point in less than 30 seconds; ideally in less than 15 seconds

Do you watch movie trailers online? Have you noticed how trailers now begin with what I call a ‘3-second pre-trailer trailer’? That’s the single, dramatic flash – both visual and auditory – that you see before the actual trailer starts. This is to catch people’s interest in the three seconds it takes to scroll by a post on your social media feed.

If movie studios are doing this with their videos, you should take a page out of their book and do the same: make the initial three seconds of your videos incredibly eye catching. Because, if you don’t, people will scroll on by.

(We’re now even better at videos at my workplace, by the way: 90-95% of viewers watch till the end of our top performing videos.)

Keep it short: recap

Let’s recap how you can save your audience’s time:

  • Keep your content incredibly short: no one has time to read blocks of text

  • Use hashtags to summarise your text: hashtags speak (almost) a thousand words

  • People will use any excuse to skip past your content: get to the point or people will go away

  • Start your videos off with a bang and keep them super short: make your point within 30 seconds

Next in the series

On to ‘Use photos and videos’…

Footnotes

[1] Yes, I know that not all sharks have to keep swimming or they die. #NotAllSharks

Create consistently good web and social media content, part 1

This is a seven-part series on how people working for businesses can create consistently good web and social media content.

I’m going to assume you already know the who, where, and why:

  • who your target audiences are;

  • the most appropriate channels (websites, intranets, social networks) to talk to them on; and

  • what your communications objectives are.

Contents (tl;dr)

I’ve organised my guidance into seven checklist items, the first of which I’ll cover in this post:

  1. Keep it easy < you are here

  2. Keep it short

  3. Use photos and videos

  4. Use numbers

  5. Share emotion

  6. Post quickly

  7. Give people a reason to care

1. Keep it easy

Make it easy for your audience to understand and follow your content. They shouldn’t have to figure out what you’re trying to say.

Here are three ways to do that.

1a. Front-load important words

Make your point at the front of your sentence or paragraph. People skim the first few words of sentences and paragraphs, particularly when they’re reading on a screen. If you don’t grab your audience’s attention straight away, they won’t read your post.

Let’s look at an example. Here’s post from a user on LinkedIn:

Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good…see more

Have you noticed how most social networks don’t display the full text a post, forcing people to click the “…see more” link if they want to keep reading? This makes it even more crucial that you make your point up front – before the ‘fold’, so to speak.

Here’s the expanded view of that post:

Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good enough for them or that I didn’t have any Ontario experience.

Today, I’m in the Bahamas for our annual conference leading the HR function across 17 countries for an amazing company owned by the largest advertising agency in the world.

Don’t let other people’s insecurities and skewed metrics of success become your reality!

Which part of that post do you think is most important?

I think it’s the last paragraph. If I could rewrite that post, this is what I’d say – with the important bit (which I’ve put in bold) moved to the beginning:

Don’t let other people’s insecurities and skewed metrics of success become your reality! #StoryTime

Months ago when I moved to Toronto, I was being told by recruiters and companies that I wasn’t good enough for them or that I didn’t have any Ontario experience.

Today, I’m in the Bahamas for our annual conference leading the HR function across 17 countries for an amazing company owned by the largest advertising agency in the world.

The entire first sentence fits before the “…see more” text break on LinkedIn and, more importantly, gets immediately to the crux of what the author is trying to say.

And now that the audience knows what the author is trying to say, the #StoryTime hashtag tells them they can expand this post to read a story that exemplifies the point.

1b. No time for small talk

Don’t include small-talk text in your content. Reading that text is almost always a waste of time for your audience.

Small-talk text – sometimes called throat-clearing text – is the text you see at the top of web pages or at the start of blog and social media posts. (Did you notice that I didn’t have any at the start of this post?)

Here’s an example of useless introductory text on a company’s ‘About us’ webpage. Can you guess which Australian company this is from?

Over our long history, our social purpose and commitment to the community has remained the same; to create connections and opportunities that matter to every Australian.

That text could be talking almost any Australian business, right? You learn almost nothing about the business from it, and I think being forced to read it is a waste of time your time.

That text, by the way, is from the Australia Post website.

Compare it to what New Zealand Post have at the top of their ‘About us’ webpage:

We provide customers with the solutions and products to help them communicate and do business.

That’s more useful. But honestly, as far as intro text on ‘About us’ pages is concerned, we can do even better.

You know what the US Postal Service have at the top of their ‘About us’ page? Nothing. Instead of text telling people what they do, they have links and icons showing people what they do.

So don’t waste your reader’s time with needless filler text, just let them get on with what they’re there to do.

1c. Make content skimmable

Help time-poor people skim your content. Why? Because most people don’t carefully read content online, they merely skim it. (At least till they find what they’re looking for; though even then they might not read it carefully.)

Here’s how you can make life easier for people looking at your content:

  • Don’t use big blocks of text: split your text into paragraphs (the shorter the better, in some situations)

  • Use lists whenever you can (bulleted or numbered lists, as required)

  • Use lots of headings

  • Use emphasis (eg colour, bold text) to draw your audience’s eyes to text that’s important

If you want to really take things up a notch: use descriptive headings. The most effective news articles on the web are the ones you can get the gist of just by reading the headline and subheadings.

Here’s an example of how we made content skimmable at my current job. We wanted to take a paper that one of our engineers presented at the Australasian Tunnelling Conference and convert that to a Medium.com article.

This is a paragraph from that conference paper:

The ability to deliver spoil to the Hornsby Quarry provided NorthConnex tunnelling sites more certainty on haulage turnaround times and dramatically reduced the total kilometres travelled for spoil disposal. Beyond the obvious financial benefits of a short haulage route, this helped to reduce the risks associated with haulage delays and enabled more efficient removal of spoil from the tunnelling sites, which mitigated one of the risks linked with delivery of the tunnelling program.

And here’s how we made that skimmable for posting to Medium.com:

Beyond the obvious financial benefits of a short haulage route, the advantages of using this site included

• dramatically reduced total kilometres travelled for spoil disposal,

• reduced risks associated with haulage delays,

• more certainty on haulage turnaround times, and

• overall more efficient removal of spoil from tunnelling site.

See how much difference you can make just by adding bullet points and putting text in bold?

Keep it easy: recap

Let’s recap how you can make your audience’s life easier:

  • Make your point quickly: front-load important words

  • Don’t give them useless text to read: no time for small talk

  • Add structure to your text that makes it easy to read on a screen: make content skimmable

There’s lots more you can do, of course. But I think this is the bare minimum.

Next in the series

On to ‘Keep it short’…

Content strategy is super important, y'all

I work in the corporate communications space – primarily on the digital and social media side – and I’ll be the first to admit that I dislike most of the online content that brands produce.

Most of what they (we?) produce is bland, boring, repetitive, shallow stuff. Even 90% of the ‘thought leadership’ content you see online isn’t particularly original or in-depth. (I’m looking at you, folks on LinkedIn.)

It would take me time explain why I think this way, but then content strategist Kristina Halvorson summed it up beautifully in a series of four tweets:

1.

Content marketing says: "Brainstorm what content your audience wants, then distribute it wherever they are."

Content strategy says: "Your audience couldn't care less about your content until they need it. Better talk to them and figure out when, what, and where that is."

2.

Let me tell you something: every time I tweet something critical about content marketing, it's because I'm sick of being inundated by a bunch of terrible advice from big "content influencers" about how to focus on the WHAT and WHERE vs. WHY.

3.

As a result, we are now seeing widespread "content chaos" for the majority of orgs who went all-in on content marketing: a ton of repetitive, unoriginal, useless content pushed out on a million different channels that people have simply lost track of.

4.

And so: we need to move leadership away from a focus on content *promotion and engagement* and towards an understanding of content as part of a holistic, integrated user journey that's driven by need, not the mythical desire to have a "relationship" with your brand.

Isn’t that brilliant?

As a content strategist myself, what I often tell communications and marketing people is that no one will be interested in your content unless it’s:

  • particularly useful (and even then, usually just to customers)

  • mildly interesting (often just to industry professionals), or

  • super cool (to everyone else).

Everything else you produce will generally be ignored.

Importantly, if you continue to pump out content that people keep ignoring, people will start to ignore you altogether. That is, producing lots of bad and boring content is worse than producing less content that’s much more interesting.

So, please folks, stop limiting your communications approach to just a few popular content tactics and start thinking about content strategy instead. Your audience will appreciate it and your brand will be more well regarded because of it.

You must communicate quickly in a crisis

Every few months at Jetstar we run a business-wide crisis exercise. All the people involved in crisis management take part. Sometimes these exercises are announced in advance, sometimes they’re a surprise. We are presented with a different crisis scenario every time.

We use these exercises to train new team members in our crisis management plan, practice the steps we’ll need to take in a real crisis, and confirm that our crisis checklists and processes are optimised and up-to-date.

Every time we do one of these exercises we learn something new and we continue to improve our approach to crisis management – and, in the case of my team, our approach to crisis communications. Plus we get the opportunity to test and update our systems, checklists, and processes.

In our most recent exercise, social media played a vital role and I was reminded of crisis communications analysis I'd done last year on the '2017 Essendon Airport Beechcraft King Air crash':

On 21 February 2017, at 8:59 am local time, a Beechcraft King Air aircraft operating a charter flight, carrying a pilot and four passengers bound for King Island, crashed seconds after taking off from Essendon Airport in Melbourne.

I’d put this analysis into a graphical timeline to show how the incident had played out on Twitter. I thought it would be useful to share the key lesson from this analysis.

Before I get to that, though, it’s important to remember that one of the key components of any crisis management plan is communications. And, when an incident occurs, you want to be as quick to communicate as you possibly can.

Because you don’t know too much about the incident early on, and you definitely don’t want to say anything that isn’t 100% correct, it’s best to start with just an acknowledgement of the incident and a promise of more information to come. This is what we call a ‘holding statement’ or a ‘holding line’.

When you post your holding line to social media you do two things. First, you reassure people that you are aware of the incident itself. Second, you make yourself part of the discussion early on.

If you don’t post that holding line, all the discussion about the incident takes place without you. And, these days, this discussion happens incredibly quickly – as my analysis showed:

Twitter timeline of 2017 Essendon DFO incident (Ameel Khan)

As you can see from the timeline, the crash occurred at 8:59am and the first tweet about it was posted exactly ten minutes later by talkback radio station 3AW. A passing motorist who had witnessed the crash had called in to talk about what he’d seen.

Two minutes later Channel 7 tweeted that they were diverting their traffic chopper to this area. And, by the time Channel Nine tweeted twenty minutes after that, video from this helicopter was being broadcast on TV and livestreamed by most Australian TV stations on both Facebook and Twitter.

Emergency services had also been tweeting alerts about the incident and the closure of the freeway next to the crash site.

FlightRadar24.com had been tweeting as well. In fact, they tweeted a screenshot of the flight data from their records a little over an hour after the crash.

The Direct Factory Outlets (DFO) shopping mall that the aircraft crashed into didn’t say anything publicly or on social media till almost two hours after the incident. But, given those folks probably don’t do as much intense crisis planning as airlines do, that’s not bad.

The key take-away here is that the bulk of the story about the crash was told within the first sixty to ninety minutes.

The lesson for businesses and for communicators is that, if an incident has anything to do with you, and you don’t jump into the online discussion quickly enough, all the discussion, the speculation, and the apportioning of blame will happen without you.

Basically, you will have lost the opportunity to share the authoritative account of the incident. Instead you’ll be stuck battling the numerous unverified, limited-knowledge stories and opinions that will already be out there.

In the case of the Essendon DFO crash, there was no charter service operator who could jump in and tell the authoritative story because the person who had chartered the aircraft was the pilot himself. So this whole story was told by other people.

If you do manage a business, however, and you find yourself involved in a major incident, then you must jump on to social media very quickly to make yourself a part of the online discussion. That means, if you haven’t created a crisis management plan, create one now. And, if you haven’t practiced yours in a while, you should go ahead and do that sooner rather than later.

To all the communicators out there who will have to deal with crises in the future: I know how difficult a job you have and I wish you all the best!

Analytics & Tracking on Online News Sites

Ever wondered how you're tracked online? In my continued research on online news sites (e.g.  here's a chart on how much they traffic they get every month) here are a couple of charts that tell you which tracking tools Australia's top online news sites use.

This list was generated using Ghostery so it covers everything from web analytics tools and beacons to ad serving tools and social network platform connectors - basically, anything that's capable of tracking you on the web. 

You can find out more about these tools in this Digital Trends article and in this 'Tracking the trackers' map by the Guardian (part of their larger 'Battle for the internet' series).

 

Alphabetical List of Trackers

Source: Ghostery tracker alerts on each news website
Pro Tip: To view full-size, right-click and open image in new tab

List of Trackers by Popularity

Source: Ghostery tracker alerts on each news website
Pro Tip: To view full-size, right-click and open image in new tab

Facebook Serves Me Ads

As someone who works in social media I look at the ads I get served on Facebook with a professional interest. Given that I haven't actually put that much information about myself on Facebook, it's fun to see how good (or bad) a job marketers and ad buyers have done in targeting those ads to me.

Of course Facebook does have a lot of my demographic data as well as my detailed social graph (though I do keep getting asked to "complete my profile", which is entertaining). It also has a history of all my likes, comments, and shares; each of which probably has multiple keyword and category associations. 

So, in what I'm hoping is the first of an ongoing series, here are the ads Facebook served me today and my thoughts on them:   

What ads do you get served on Facebook? And are they any good? 

Where do I go for News and Opinion?

While trying to decide whether I’d sign up for a Fairfax Digital Subscription or not (I ultimately decided not to) I thought it would be fun to document my news media consumption habits. (Being a nerd is so much fun!)

Here’s what I came up with.

Breaking News 

Where do I go to get breaking news? 

When a news tory breaks the first site I check is Twitter.

I then move on to Reddit to see what news content has been aggregated and bubbled-up by the online community. There I get both first-hand news and news that’s been collected by various outlets.

Next I check the BBC because they'll always have the most reliable and least biased story.

Finally, I go to Google News because that service quickly aggregates lots of news stories from multiple online sources, covering multiple angles.

If the breaking news is Australia- or Melbourne-specific I also check the Age and the ABC (though, in most cases, their news stories get captured pretty quickly by Google News anyway). I sometimes also check the online streaming versions of ABC News 24 and a few radio stations like ABC NewsRadio, 774 Melbourne, and 3AW.

More in-depth news and editorial opinion

What if I want more depth? 

When I want a little more depth to a news story my first stop is usually the BBC. Those folk not only excel at presenting an overview of what’s going but they also give a bit of background and then flesh out those bits of the story that are important at the time. (I usually follow this up by a few quick searches on Google and Wikipedia if I want more information.)

However, if want a much deeper analysis or some high-quality editorial opinion on a particular topic or story then the sites I go first to are academic news outlets like the Conversation, a bunch topic-specific blogs (I subscribe to a lot of blogs via RSS), and sites with strong editorial voices and traditions like the Guardian and the Economist.

I then visit a bunch of independent news outlets or, categorizing them more broadly, sites from which I get smart, well written, and mature news reports, opinion, and discussion. These include ProPublica, The Global Mail, New Matilda, Salon, Slate, the Atlantic, and a handful of others. 

Aside from those major sources I also read some blogs and feature pieces on the ABC and Fairfax websites (e.g. stuff written by Lauren Rosewarne or Sam de Brito). However, ABC and Fairfax don’t have the depth of coverage that the sites mentioned previously do; nor do they have as many contributors whose editorial opinions I value that much.

Local News & Opinion

What if the story is local? 

When a news story is local my preferred sources are the Age and the ABC (including, as mentioned above, the online streaming versions of ABC News 24, ABC NewsRadio, and 774 Melbourne). Though, increasingly, the Guardian with its new Australian edition is becoming a bigger part of my regular local media consumption.

Meanwhile, 3AW and the Conversation, while good sources, don’t cover as much as the Age and ABC do.

Daily Media Consumption

Speaking of my regular media consumption, these are the news sites I check on the tram both to and from work every day and also on weekend afternoons:

Daily Media Consumption.png

The top four are the important ones: I check the Age for updates on what’s happening in the city and around the country. I check the BBC and the Guardian to find out what’s going on in the world. And, I check the ABC to read more about what’s going on in both Australia and the world.

If I have time left in my commute then I then close that folder and check Reddit (the app in the background in the top left hand corner).

And if after that I still have more time I sometimes check my RSS feeds via NewsBlur and occasionally read the stories I’d saved earlier in Pocket.

As you can see, restricting my Fairfax consumption to thirty articles per month isn't going to be difficult because Fairfax is already a pretty small part of my news media consumption mix. This despite the fact that I check the Age website every morning because, when I do, I only occasionally click-through to read a whole article - I usually just skim the headlines.

So there you have it, my media consumption preferences. What sites do you visit to get news and opinion? 

Why I Won’t be Getting a Fairfax Digital Subscription

On 2 July 2013 Fairfax Media will launch its digital subscriptions and erect a paywall around its two major newspaper websites, the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. From that day onwards Australian visitors to those sites will be able to read thirty free articles per month but, should they want to read more, they’ll need to sign up as paying customers.

I won’t be one of those paying customers and this mind map explains why:

 

You Can’t Build a Free Global PR Wiki Like This

MyPRGenie, a social-media focused PR firm, wants to create a “free global PR wiki” that will crowdsource contact information for “journalists, bloggers and media gatekeepers”.

Free global PR wiki to crowdsource media contact details

A crowdsourced listing of media contacts is set to launch, providing the PR industry with a database of information on journalists and media professionals.

Launching out of New York in March, the wiki-style platform will be open to PR professionals who contribute to the community by sharing information they’ve collected on journalists, bloggers and media gatekeepers. By sharing their contacts, users earn points which can then be spent to gain access to the global database.

Interesting concept. Probably won’t be successful, though.

Why?

Free

The only free global wiki that’s ever managed to collect a large amount of quality information is Wikipedia – and Wikipedia is run by a non-profit foundation whose philosophy revolves around cataloguing and freely sharing information.

From the sounds of it MyPRGenie’s service will be “free” (i.e. available for you to use) only if you contribute to it yourself; and presumably even then there will be some additional restrictions to what you can access or do once you have that information. Which, of course, means that, unlike the Wikipedia style service they want to be associating themselves with, their service not actually free.

Global

MyPRGenie say they already have a database of over half a million “journalists, bloggers, and content creators” which my guess is they’ll use to seed their wiki. While that number is large I’m not sure this endeavour is a pure numbers game.

When you hire a PR firm to work for you, you pick one based on their knowledge of your industry and the local media market, plus their relationships with various media people. You don’t pick them because they have the largest contacts database.

If I worked for a rival PR agency my argument against using this service would be: “Why would you want to use that? They’ll just send your press releases to a bunch of media and social media people. I’m on a first name basis with the influencers in your specific industry and in your specific market so when I send them something they know it’ll be worth their while.”

PR Wiki

Possibly the biggest problem they’ll face is that I don’t think many PR departments or agencies will want to participate – certainly not major companies with a large contacts databases. Why on earth would companies (or agencies) want to share their PR relationship IP with the rest of the world (which, of course, includes their competitors)?

Wrong Business Plan?

MyPRGenie’s business plan for this service seems to be “build it and they will come (to crowdsource)”. That doesn’t works unless you do things like offer fabulous incentives for sharing IP, have dedicated editors maintaining content quality, and don’t blatantly make money off the data you collect. Now they might actually do all these things and the resulting service might end up being useful to small and medium-sized companies with limited PR budgets and limited relationships with the media. But that’s probably about it.

Basically, I don’t think you can crowdsource this kind of information unless you make it completely free and open like Wikipedia or you run a freemium model like IMDb or LinkedIn in which you get both the demand and supply side to pay for the professional, fee-based version of that otherwise free service.

MyPRGenie seem to be trying a third approach to this information cataloguing problem – one that relies on a few assumptions that I don’t think are particularly valid. It’d be nice to be proven wrong but I don’t think I will be.

Working at Jetstar is Like Working at a Startup

I'm not sure if this applies to all Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) but working at Jetstar feels like you’re working at a startup. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I love working here.

In a guest post on Venture Beat Elli Sharef wrote about the ‘5 Things You Need to Know Before Working at a Startup’. Three of these apply directly to life at Jetstar:

Ownership

Working at Jetstar you really have to own what you do and, of course, believe strongly in what you're doing. So, for example, if you're the one who comes up with a great idea then you're the one who has to implement it. Sometimes you get to do this literally all on your own from start to finish.

And when you're given ownership on one part of the business – in my case, Jetstar's social media presence – it's all yours to do with whatever you want (given, of course, that what you do makes business sense and fits well with what others are doing; and, if it’s something drastically different, is approved by senior executives).

This level of ownership, control, and direct responsibility is both exciting and terrifying.

Mentoring and Guidance

Because in a startup you're often doing stuff that is new and innovative you don't really have people who can guide and mentor you in your role based on their years of experience in this field. Case in point: before Jetstar no other full-service carrier (in our case, Qantas) had launched a low-cost subsidiary that was as successful as Jetstar is now.

On the social media side of things, for example, I certainly don't know of any other large, customer-focused, seven-year-old Australian company that, while partnering with a large sixty-year-old Japanese company, is providing customer service to people in Japan in Japanese via Facebook and Twitter.

A lot of what we’re doing here is new and innovative. This is stuff that no one or very few people have done before and it’s incredibly exciting to be at this leading edge.

Pressure

This third point is important because it determines whether you'll be at Jetstar for six months or five years. Sharef puts it really well:

The pressure to achieve results, hit metrics, achieve growth, and get more traction can be overwhelming for many. We’ve seen lots of people quit startups because they realized the emotional pressures were simply too much for them. It’s awesome to know your work can help make or break the business, but with great opportunity comes great responsibility!

The good thing is that, while the pressure may be high, the rush I get from making a real difference to what Jetstar does on social media is incredibly rewarding. Certainly at this point in my career I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing and anywhere else I’d rather be working.

What People Want From Social Media

Thomson Dawson published an article on Branding Strategy Insider a couple of weeks ago called 'Social Media Marketing Is An Oxymoron'.

In it he argues:

There is no place for marketing in social media.

Think about being at a party having an enjoyable conversation with someone of like mind, then some annoying person interrupts your conversation to tell you how great they are and why you should engage with them. This is basically what most "social media marketing" really is.  People hate being interrupted.

While I agree that people hate being interrupted by companies who are trying to talk to them or sell them something, I don’t agree with his generalization because I think the situation is a little more complex than that.

You are the Product

I think people understand and accept that, when companies provide them with free online services (such as an account on a social networking site), those companies aren’t doing this out the goodness of their hearts. Even Governments don’t provide services for free (yaay, taxes!) so there’s no reason to believe that any company would.

Instead of paying money for those services what people give these companies in exchange is:

  • information about themselves and their relationships with others online (referred to as their ‘social graph’ – a term coined by Facebook),
  • information about their interests and where they spend time on online, and
  • their attention (so that third parties can market stuff to them via advertising).

The Silicon Valley way of putting this is:

If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

And people are more or less okay with that ‘product’ – that online version of themselves – being sold to companies. They know that, in turn, those companies will use this opportunity (i.e. the time they spend on various social media platforms) to sell stuff back to them. If this sounds familiar that’s because this is essentially the advertising-based free-to-air TV model (though with more sophisticated ad targeting).

So people expect to be marketed to on social media.

Not the Whole Story

But, that’s not the whole story because, sometimes, people don’t just expect to be marketed to, they want to be marketed to.

They want companies to sell them the stuff they want, when they want it, where they want it. In addition, they expect to talk to companies about their products and services – both before and after purchasing.

What People Want From Social Media

The way I see it, people seem to want five broad things from companies in the online and social media space:

1. Information

This includes things like product information, contact details, terms and conditions, sizing charts, and so on. People look for this information on websites and Wikipedia pages and they search or ask for it on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and forums. They also discover products on sites like Pinterest.

2. Help

This covers everything from help with product information (when you’ve just entered the market for that product) all the way to customer support (after you’ve bought the product). People look for help on websites or they ask for it on Facebook and Twitter. And, depending on what the company offers, people might also ask for help over the phone, via Skype, or using live web chat.

3. Deals

This includes things like exclusive or early sales/deals, as well as prizes or other kinds of loyalty rewards. People look for deals on websites, in mailing lists, or on company/brand Facebook Pages and Twitter streams. These people aren't the most brand loyal but they do drive a lot of sales.

4. Connection

This covers a whole bunch of engagement, participation, and ownership needs that include a continuing two-way dialog; input into what companies do and how they operate; and a general sharing of thoughts, ideas, and values. People look for this connection on company blogs, on Facebook and Google+ profiles, and, in smaller chunks, on Twitter. The people who engage with companies in this way are generally the most loyal and are often the company’s strongest advocates. Or, in the case of engagement via Kickstarter, they’re also the company’s founding members and/or financial investors.

5. Jobs

For a specific group of people who are in the job market, what they want from companies also includes job offers, engagement with HR teams, and information about the company and its culture. People look for this information and engagement on websites, via Google searches, on blogs and forums, on LinkedIn, and, increasingly, on other social media platforms (i.e. not just on LinkedIn).

It All Comes Down to Targeting

What it comes down to, then, is the idea of audience targeting. Companies need to have different approaches for engaging with different audience groups. And, if an audience group is receptive to being marketed at, then companies should jump right in.

For example, if was on a message board talking to people about a specific kind of computer that I wanted to buy in the next six months, I’d be more than happy to hear from a company representative about a product they sell that’s in this category. On the other hand, I would be upset if I was marketed to when I wasn’t looking for that kind of communication or engagement.

So, if companies get that targeting aspect right, then ‘social media marketing’ is a completely valid concept.

We’re Still Not There Yet

Sadly, a lot of companies are terrible at this kind of communication. They continue to treat ‘social media’ as just another advertising channel though which they talk at people.

Which, by the way, reminds me of this fantastic cartoon from Hugh MacLeod:

ifyoutalkedtopeople

I guess it’s this kind of misinformed approach to marketing via social media that prompted Dawson to write his article in the first place. And, in that, I agree with him completely. A lot of companies still don’t get it right and that really needs to change if they want to make the best use of the social media opportunity that they are currently wasting.

How these companies need to change is, of course, a whole other massive topic. Fortunately, it’s a topic that will keep people like me – people who understand both marketing and social media – employable for at least the next few years :)