YouTube Taught Me

Branding. It’s a huge part of everyday life and you may not even realize it. Say you are walking down the aisles at Publix one day and realize you’re out of mouthwash at home. Which brand do you buy? Do you stick with Listerine because of its reputation with dentists or do you stick with the good old generic brand because it says “comparable to” Listerine? All of us are different but almost all of us use branding in some way, shape or form to formulate our opinions on things.  Branding has been categorized as “the process of creating value through the provision of a compelling and consistent offer and customer experience that will satisfy customers and keep them coming back” (i-Branding: developing the internet as a branding tool.) But this definition excludes a growing segment of branding that has been proliferated due to the rise of social media. That segment would be Personal Branding. Do you have a blog? If so, how many followers do you have? What about Facebook or Twitter and your number of followers on those platforms? YOU are a brand to those people. When they think of a spunky or sassy individual maybe they think of you because you’re always posting funny commentary on your day to day interactions with people. Personal branding is a vital part of life in today’s digital, social media obsessed world and we all have to learn how to create, manage, and cultivate our brands properly. 

An incredible example of personal branding would be the rise of the Youtuber. I was recently helping out at an elementary school and I asked one of the little boys I was helping what he wanted to be when he grew up. I was expecting the basics…astronaut, firefighter, policemen. But no…he said he wanted to be a Youtuber! The word Youtuber seems like it would be hard to find a proper definition for but nope: it’s easily searchable on the Oxford online living dictionary. Oxford defines the term as “A frequent user of the video-sharing website YouTube, especially someone who produces and appears in videos on the site” (Oxford Living Dictionary.) There are all kinds of Youtubers to appeal to every type of viewer. There are beauty “gurus” who specialize in makeup and hair tutorials. There are lifestyle Youtubers who cover things on their channels such as home décor, fashion, and the latest trends. There are gamers who film themselves playing video games for other people to watch (how meta is that?!) There are even family vloggers who film weekly videos about their families lives in the span of a day or week (my personal favorite of these has got to be The Michalaks!) There’s a Youtube channel and Youtuber behind it for just about everybody.  And these channel curators are making major money off these channels by harnessing the power of their own personal brands.

While many of the top Youtubers do make money off Youtube via Googles AdSense advertising many other popular YouTubers leverage their online notoriety to partner with brands (e.g. Bethany Mota's partnership with Aeropostale) or to become or launch brands themselves (e.g. Michelle Phan's Ipsy). (How top Youtubers Launch their own brands.) Through lucrative book deals, podcasts, and in some cases even movie deals (Camp Takota and Dirty 30 are both movies that were written, executive produced, and star Youtubers,) these creators have forged a new path to fame and notoriety without the help of traditional media. Most Youtubers pride themselves on being authentic, on delivering only content that their viewers want to watch. This strategy of branding themselves as authorities on whatever they create has served these Youtubers well. They have all managed to take their personal brand – the reputation and image that you intentionally create- and make it into a successful business (Fundamentals of Personal Branding.) Youtubers have also figured out that careful strategy of leveraging social media platforms to attain greater influencing power. Most beauty “gurus” on Youtube for instance all started out with blogs. Those blogs grew to YouTube tutorials, which grew into brand endorsements and sponsorships, which in some cases has grown to having their own beauty ranges. Zoella in particular is a big phenomenon in this realm. A survey of 13-18 year olds recently showed that “YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable” (Why are YouTube Stars so Popular?) These trends show that the phenomenon of the Youtuber is not going away any time soon.

As strategic communication professionals, we can take these lessons from Youtubers and apply them to our organizations. It’s about so much more than maintaining the company blog anymore. Blogs can allow us to control the message being presented to the public about our organizations, in much the same way our media buys and marketing items can. However, these are not enough anymore. We have to be compelling and own our content (we need to be THE experts,) be consistent in our usage of and posting to social media and above all be streamlined. Everything has to flow (much like Youtubers progressions from blogs to the video platform) and the more it flows the more appealing our organizations brand becomes. We can’t depend on a Facebook like anymore to guarantee that somebody out there is talking about us. We have to strategize, make other brands come to us, and make our demographics work for us not against us. If we know our target audience is primarily women aged 25-34 then we can personalize our marketing efforts. Personalization allows us to “precisely and cost effectively target segments and develop more one-to-one relationships” (iBranding.) This is one of the most powerful aspects of the internet and social media. Everything can be personalized to suit somebody’s specific tastes. Our brands need to find their niche much like Youtubers have. The more we appeal to those niche markets the better off our brands will be. We won’t be everybody’s cup of tea that’s for sure. We need to make our communications with those people who DO like us count and personalizing our communications is a great way to start.

Thanks for checking out the blog this week! Only two more entries to go regarding Emerging Media before we change gears. Stay tuned!

The Comfort Zone

I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader. This week was a challenge for me. My readings focused on politics, crowdsourcing and the global impact of emerging media. These readings forced me to come out of my comfort zone in regards to readings about political commentary. It made me realize that I had made that most common of mistakes…I had unfollowed, unfriended, and curated my social media news feeds until I was in a “bubble” of like-minded individuals with no outside opinions allowed. I’m grateful for this week’s readings because at points it made me realize just how damaging that “bubble” can be, and how it’s important that we maintain a healthy perspective, especially when it comes to politics. This week’s post touches on the topic but only lightly and I hope you too gain some perspective as well from my take on how 2016 changed not only the political landscape but the media landscape as well, and how we can try and do better in the future for ourselves and our organizations by recognizing change as its happening through emerging media.

It’s common knowledge in most higher education circles that the tools and platforms used to communicate news and other important information is changing almost daily along with the public's media consumption habits.  To quote a professor of mine, “Teaching about these changes is difficult. In fact, most, if not all, journalism and communication textbooks are out-of-date the moment they are printed because of the speed of advancements in the world of digital media.” This past year was one of challenges for the traditional media, one where the ever changing habits of the public’s media consumption was one of the biggest stars of the 2016 presidential election. Traditional media’s perception, credibility, and trustworthiness have all been called into serious question by over half the country. But how did we get here? Why did the traditional media get it so wrong in 2016 and why didn’t they see this coming? 

Donald Trump’s campaign was able to pull off something that nobody thought they could do. Every poll in the country by most established news outlets had him losing the general election at varying points throughout 2016 by up to 80%. Donald Trump was the end result of years of action by online communities who had gotten more than fed up with the status quo. They were tired of not seeing their voices, concerns, and stories in the traditional media. So they took to the Web, to write and read blogs, to create their own news sites (a la Breitbart News) and to discuss things that they saw missing in the traditional media coverage. In Digital Democracy: Reimagining Pathways to Political Participation, the authors stated that their research pointed towards the fact that “blog readers are involved in a range of participatory activities, both online and offline, and that these two spheres are highly complementary and mutual supportive.” This suggests that a virtual and real world combination of activism is emerging to create a truly digital democracy on both sides of the aisle.

The disparity between this group of actively engaged users and the group who were actively engaged users for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could not have been wider. Democratic nominee supporters were with traditional media, often sighting the stories most often published as for the greater good (ex. Marriage equality in 2015, Islamaphobia discussion over terrorist threat discussions, and so on.) Hillary Clinton’s camp got it wrong but so did almost all of the established mainstream media. They didn’t ignore what was happening online on sites such as Brietbart News but they didn’t fully engage in it. They didn’t take the time to understand just how pervasive sites such as Brietbart were getting. They didn’t invest in trying to understand the messages these groups were sending and the support they were receiving. Instead they ignored it completely or underreported it and as such, they allowed the biggest change in political history to occur.

Donald Trump’s political career could easily be defined in his use of social media, particularly Twitter. Never in the country’s history has a president been so free and willing to communicate with the public through such a personal messaging tool. Many experts would say that this is what gave him the election. He was not afraid to break hardwired political rules. A few examples of these rules are below, taken from How the political rules changed in 2016, written by AEI.

• ·         Celebrities don’t count.
• ·         Polling and big data don’t automatically generate the right moves
• ·         Outrageous statements aren’t disqualifying.

That last one is yuge. A study back in 2011 found that the “digital divide for social media users is wider between the haves and have-nots than it is between young and old” (So much for digital democracy: New study finds elite viewpoints dominate online content.) Simply put, politically incorrect, working class were (and are) underrepresented on the Internet. Their messages were being ignored by the mainstream and Donald Trump saw that. He was able to take those politically incorrect feelings and give them a physical mouthpiece. And the mainstream media took him at his word. They saw Donald Trump throughout his campaign as someone who was worthy of being taken seriously but not literally, while his supporters saw it the other way around.

So what does all this mean for us as strategic communicators? For me the biggest lesson in learning about the 2016 election was the idea of complacency. We all have a tendency to get in our own bubbles, or comfort zones. Clearly, traditional media were prepared for the old political guard’s way of doing things when the country was ready for a stiff departure from that. They didn’t take the time to see and acknowledge things from that metaphorical “other person’s” point of view. We as a society clearly were caught up in our own typical every-4-year political cycle and failed to notice it crumbling around us. As communicators, we have to be aware of changes happening around us and organizations, even if that change is not one we like or approve of. That change can be online or offline, a new product or tool, or a person running for political office. We have to be willing to take a step back and see it from another perspective before the lack of perspective drowns us.

As I said in my intro this week, I was pushed out of comfort zone reading and writing this week. But I am so glad I was, because it really brought together for me why Donald Trump is now our president and how we can take the lessons currently being learned by the traditional media and apply it to our own work and lives. Thanks for stopping by and see you guys again next week!

Everybody’s got one

Opinion. Everybody’s got one. It’s a touchy subject, now more so than ever before with the current political climate we now live in. Everybody has one and everybody wants to share theirs with anybody who will listen. It’s a basic principal of pluralism and democracy, this allowance to demonstrate and voice our differences publicly. Blogs and other social platforms have made is easier to share those opinions with the world and to develop communities with other like-minded or concerned individuals. These bloggers can sometimes be called “citizen journalists.” Citizen journalism is defined as "the act of a citizen...playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information" (This is Citizen Journalism at its finest.) The draw of citizen journalism is "the prospect of citizens themselves participating in the agenda setting process" (Social news, citizen journalism and democracy.) When people create and utilize blogs, nine times out of ten it is because they are trying to connect with people. They are trying and succeeding in participating in the national conversation by becoming active contributors versus passive consumers. Blogs give citizen journalists that sense that they are taking back the power from the traditional news outlets to dictate the news cycle by contributing their own thoughts and opinions through stories, photos, or videos.

Most of our readings this week dealt with citizen journalists and they all made me think about the same thing…Are citizen journalists (and by extension their blogs and websites) reliable sources of news information and can they compare with their traditional news media counterparts to change the media landscape?

It’s my humble opinion that they are capable of both.  Citizen journalists and their blogs, websites, or whatever social platform they happen to use, are creating their own communities. In many cases, these citizen journalists might be the only ones reporting on their communities, which automatically gives them a healthy dose of credibility.  If you’re the only one investigating, writing, and producing content about a certain issue, community, or area you are going to become an authority.  An example that comes to mind is http://www.northescambia.com/.  This online newspaper (which functions more like a blog) reports events that happen in North Escambia County, FL. This upper half of the county tends to get underreported in the local traditional new outlets that report on Escambia County (local TV Station WEAR and The Pensacola News Journal.) While only in operation for a few short years, it has already placed itself as the news authority for “the North End” of Escambia County.  If any major news events occur beyond the city of Pensacola’s city limits, the traditional outlets depend on northescambia.com to report about it. They have become the source for their community. The last sentence on northescambia.com’s About section reads, “With your help, we’ll provide you with a complete look at what is happening here in our community.”  This website depends on citizen journalists to function and for the most part has done a good job with utilizing these contributors and maintaining their sense of credibility. If an accident of some kind has occurred (an example I’m thinking of is an auto accident) they will take photos and eye witness reports and combine it with the official statement from the Florida Highway Patrol. They have managed to find the sweet spot…providing unrestricted commentary in the midst of sourced information.

The biggest claim against blogs and citizen journalists is the potential for deception or extreme bias, in that these journalists are not beholden to the same ethical standards as their traditional counterparts.  Sources are often cited as being the best way to ensure accuracy and broadness in a journalists reporting. The more sources you have, the better chance you have of presenting all sides fairly. In a study about source diversity in US online citizen journalism and online newspaper articles, it was found that online newspaper articles featured an average of 3.64 sources per article while citizen journalism articles averaged in roughly 1.37 per article.  Traditional journalists do have a tendency to utilize more sources, thus making their articles and opinions appear more credible. However traditional journalists have the advantage over citizen journalists in a key way that changes everything. They have access to official sources, larger databases, new wires, you name it. Citizen journalists tend to only have unofficial, carefully mined sources who may be close to a particular topic but don’t have the official “in.” Think about asking the Pope for a quote about contemporary Catholicism versus your local priest. They may both have the same general consensus on the topic (even using the same verbiage) but the Pope (official source) is going to look more credible than your local clergy (unofficial source.) I don’t think a proliferation or lack of sources makes or breaks you in the journalist world. Look at the Huffington Post for example.  It started out as a blog in 2005 and by 2009 has expanded so heavily it was investing $1.75 million into a fund for investigative reporting. The HuffPo has not been without its share of controversies but its contribution of commentary within well sourced news content has changed the online and traditional media landscapes irrevocably. 

Another claim to support citizen journalists as reliable sources and comparable to their traditional counterparts is in the traditional news’ steady infiltration into the blogosphere. Sites like HuffPo and Newsvine actively use videos and stories from traditional outlets such as CNN and the BBC. In some cases, like with Newsvine, they are even owned by traditional companies (Newsvine is owned by MSNBC.) Traditional news outlets will more than likely never stop influencing what the public views as newsworthy, but I personally feel there is room for collaboration between the old and the new. Many traditional news outlets now include some form of contribution from a citizen journalist. From videos taken on cell phones during protests that are used during broadcast news, to comments on news stories that are then read live on the air, citizen journalist’s contributions are making an impact on the news cycle. They are breaking down the barrier between the traditional "gatekeepers" and the average Joe. I believe this collaboration is critical, now more than ever. We need citizen journalists who aren't afraid to attend protests and report back live video feeds to their own blogs for traditional sites to pick up. Bloggers have the capability to enact real change through their work, be it written, verbal, or visual. Whether we like it or not, opinions do matter, especially when they are voiced with intention. Opinions can and do effect the world we live in. Through establishing themselves and growing their communities, they (the blogs, and the citizen journalists behind them) have the potential to change the media landscape for the better.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post and come back next week!

Sources:

Pilkington, Ed. "Is the Huffington Post Ready to Replace the Ailing US Newspaper Industry?"The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 05 Apr. 2009. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

(2010). Citizen Journalism at its finest. New Media and Society, 12(8).

Goode, Luke (2009). Social news, citizen journalism, and democracy. New Media and Society, 11(8), 1287-1305.

Carpenter, Serena (2008.) Source Diversity in US Online Citizen Journalism and Online Newspaper articles, International Symposium on Online Journalism. 

The thing that goes bump in the night

Social Media is the boogeyman for most professional strategic communicators. It is arguably one of the biggest nightmares currently facing our profession.  Think about it…it’s the thing that goes bump in the night. President Donald Trump tweets about how Delta had a computer malfunction leading to chaos at national airports at roughly 7am and less than two hours later Delta stocks have already dropped by 1.8% and are continuing to fall. If you worked for Delta in public relations or communications, imagine waking up and having to back track and realize it took one tweet to make your work hell for the next week, if not longer? Social media influences everything, whether we want to believe it or not. It effects our self-esteem, our social lives, even our physical health. It’s our job as professional strategic communicators to figure out how to harness these new forms of media for good rather than evil. We have to make friends with the boogeyman and make everyone realize it’s not so scary after all, especially for the Baby Boomers and the Silent generation.  

The explosive and exponential growth that has been seen from social media over the past decade will continue. There will be better apps built, faster processors created, smaller devices to use to connect us. We can’t ignore social media anymore. It’s now being taught in our undergraduate courses for communications majors. The newer generation of strategic communicators are learning how to develop social media aspects for communications plans. No longer is it just a “fit it in somewhere with the press releases” mentality. Social Media IS the entire communications plan now and is already being utilized as such for some companies in existence today. As social media adapts and changes we have to be able to understand how it can be used for both good and evil before we can truly harness it’s capabilities for our organizations.  We have to understand the dynamics of social media before we can begin to understand what is being said about our organizations and how we ourselves speak about our organizations.

Alexis Ohanian in his TED Talk on “How to make a splash in social media” talked about Mister Splashy Pants, a project conceived of by Greenpeace to save Humpback whales that was turned into a meme that ultimately worked out in Greenpeace’s favor. It “was all done out of interest of doing something cool, and this is kind of how the internet works,” he said. The Internet is certainly a fountain for cool things. Depending on your mood you can find something funny, heartfelt, or dramatic all with just a few searches. It is full of information on any subject you can name or think of. It’s obviously an invaluable resource for modern life. Social media has done the best thing it could do for the world – it has brought people together on an unprecedented scale. It’s allowed people to discuss, in real time, national tragedies, day to day life updates, you name it. If you want to talk about something, there is somebody online somewhere on social media who will talk to you about it. That’s one, if not the, best things about the Internet and social media. But for every like-minded individual you find there is someone else who differs from your opinion. Somebody who may try and bait you into a conversation you may not want to have. Somebody who can push your buttons and make you think the world is a horrible place. It can radicalize your opinions on just about everything, if you let it.

This is social media’s dark side. While applications like Twitter and Facebook can connect us with people all over the world, it also forces us to open ourselves up to differing viewpoints and, in some cases, take a cold hard look at ourselves in the mirror and realize we are part of the problem not the solution. Polarization on applications across the Web is the biggest proponent of evil on social media today. It effects every conversation, every meme posted, even people’s handles on social media! Social media now has the power to unite and divide us. Cass Sunstein claimed that “contemporary media and the Internet have abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe.” People nowadays go online more to argue than to agree in some cases. Looking for a fight, especially in today’s charged political environment, where one tweet can set off a firestorm of differing opinions, is quickly becoming a national pastime.

It’s our job to remember the good side of social media. The original spirit of connection and unity should be what we put out for our organizations. We have to remember to allow people to share their differing opinions in a constructive way and not add to the ever increasing divide. When we develop social media plans for our organizations, we have to keep in mind that not everybody is going to like what we have to say. The term “troll” comes to mind while I’m typing this. There will be people who speak about our organizations in ways we feel strongly about. We have to remember though, that that discourse has to be allowed and approached in a constructive, and most importantly, strategic way. You can take “bad press” and make it good again. There are ways to make positive splashes on social media from less than stellar remarks. It’s encouraging that more and more high profile companies are utilizing real people versus bots or automated post generators in their social media communications. It speaks volumes to how important social media voices are for companies and organizations. The human voice and its ability to connect us is the reason social media works…it’s the yang to the yin of polarization. We just have to remain open, honest and remember why we do this.

I hope you guys enjoyed my post this week and come back next week! Have a great weekend everybody!