Corporate Messaging and Social Media: Can They Co-exist?
Funny thing about using social networking tools with corporate online video: if you're not careful, the results can go terribly wrong.
Speaking at the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London, Jake Ward, business development director for hosting and webcasting company Groovy Gecko, told about an event where Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi addressed an audience in front of a Twitter wall -- which was full of hundreds of messages all attacking him in various creative ways.
A moderation step would have prevented that from happening.
Also on the panel was Will Hambling, strategic director and owner at Within Design and Reach Streaming. He noted that it's sometimes helpful to let the audience pick the topics.
"We recently did an event for the Legal Sector Alliance, which is a group of law firms who are very much driven by sustainability, and they actually left an open session at the end of one of their events, and the purpose of that open session was just to respond to what people had said throughout the event. So it actually was, effectively, a blank session at the end. I'm biased, because I was part of it, but I actually found that to be the most interesting session. Whilst I agree we have to be very careful, I think it's inevitable, I think it will happen, and there are lots of great examples of where it works," said Hambling.
The panel also addressed the issue of targeted viewing, meaning hand selecting your event's audience to get favorable viewers in and keep unfavorable viewers out. Hambling said to use invitations carefully.
"When we came into this space, we knew that a lot of our clients at the end of an event would say 'How many people viewed? How many people did we get online?' I think historically that's how we've gauged the success of online products -- the number of people or the hours or minutes. But if we take a step back and we look at how we used to monitor the same media coverage, we used to go through and say 'It got x number of column inches,' which means that it's successful. Actually, the more we looked at it the more we realized that the amount somebody saw something had no impact at all on the quality of the message," noted Hambling.
Companies that invite their audience should be careful to offer a dialogue, Hambling continued. Respond offline to any issues that come up and get back to people immediately. If an issue is difficult, the best way to get back to your message is to address the issue head-on, he noted.
To view the entire discussion, watch the video below:
Corporate Messaging and Social Media Webcasting: Can They Co-exist?
Moderator: Simon Frusher, Director of UK Operations, TalkPoint
Jake Ward, Business Development Director, Groovy Gecko
Will Hambling, Strategic Director & Owner, Within Design & Reach Streaming
Marco Forgione, Chief Executive, IVCA
Zoe Arden, Director of Sustainability, MSL Group
As executives strive to create a social media footprint, they make an effort to integrate a variety of applications into their business strategy. This session will explore social media webcasting and the effects of incorporating social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and other group chat functionalities into a live webcast. Attendees will learn about the impact of corporate guidelines on social media, the use of social media in webcasting, and the effects of social media webcasting on the corporate message.