‘Digitalising Aunty’ – Mark Scott’s vision for the ABC

Australia’s ABC, affectionately known as ‘Aunty’, is often regarded as an institution that is slow to embrace innovations and technologies –almost a relic of bygone times.  Aunty has a certain old school feel about her, whether it be the familiar faces of its presenters or its consistent programming. However, in reality, a more fitting name for the ABC of today would reflect that the ABC has broken down barriers ahead of its commercial cohorts.

Last month, about 150 guests crammed into a small room at the UTS Aerial Function Centre to hear Mark Scott, the managing director of the ABC, outline how the ABC was responding in the era of digital information, as part of the UTSpotlight series for the university’s alumni.

Scott reflected on a time when the ability of audiences and readers to quench their news thirst was at the mercy of the country’s news editors and newsagents. For example, if your newsagent wanted to, he could sell you a nine day-old copy of the New York Times; if you made it home in time, you would watch Richard Morecroft read the news, and if the head of news at Fairfax thought you might be interested, you could read an article from The Washington Post.

However, times have changed and while many see the ABC’s charter, structure and funding to be constraints holding it back, Scott believes innovation loves constraints and he’s taken these constraints by the horns. His view is the ABC should be more innovative, more relevant and more responsive to Australians than any other network.

Since taking the helm in 2006, Scott has expanded its services and the ABC now provides news, information, entertainment and other content across an expanding array of platforms: four television channels; digital radio channels to complement the four national and 60 local services; an elaborate online operation and customised material for mobile and other new media devices.

It’s fair to say the ABC is leading the digital charge. Its iView product, developed on a typical ABC budget of ‘as little as possible’, was the first to unlock audiences from their nightly 7pm social contracts with newsreaders to view their news. It meant they could view the news, and their favourite TV shows, at any time, from anywhere using the device of their choosing – iPhone, iPad or iMac. The ABC has realised the importance of digital and online in helping it to engage and maintain its audience.

Even the stalwart ‘old school’ bastions of the ABC have moved into the digital age – Four Corners has a Facebook page to interact with its audience, and Q&A regularly generates more than 30, 000 tweets in a single hour. The ABC has revolutionised the content Australians are seeing on their screens, centering it around them and what they have to say.

According to Scott, the role of the ABC is no longer that of a news teller but as a news host — a place where people can tell their own news and stories. The ABC is about Australian content and stories, stories for Australians by Australians. It provides a platform that allows them to do so. And where better than in their own world – online.

Guest post by Dorea Lau (@dorealau)

Part 1: John Bell: Moving beyond the experimentation phase of social media

When John Bell, head of the global 360° Digital Influence team – Ogilvy’s global social media marketing and communications practice, was in Sydney in June, Ogilvy PR’s Heather Jacobs caught up with him to talk about social media.

Based in Washington DC, Bell heads up the global team of Digital Influence Strategists integrating the power of social media – social networks, blogs, Web 2.0 applications – with digital marketing to produce measureable results. He’s developed strategy and executed award-winning programs for clients including Ford, Lenovo, Unilever, BP and American Express.

Following is a three-part series on how brands can get started in social media, measure its impact, how Australia compares to the rest of the world when it comes to social media and the challenge of finding social media experts who also understand marketing and communications.

Part 1: Moving beyond the experimentation phase

Question: You have a theory that brands are moving through what you call ‘the experimentation stage’ in social media? Can you explain this?

John Bell: The enterprise adoption curve shows there’s a path brands typically move along. It starts with phase zero, where people are nervous and full of anticipation, and shifts into the listening stage where brands want to know what people are saying about them online.

From there it moves onto the experimentation stage, where brands try things in social media – implement programs, encourage various regions around the world to try different things and allow entrepreneurial drive within the company to push forward experiments.

Pretty soon brands find that this approach doesn’t produce a significant business result so they want to get efficiencies or ‘operationalize’ their approach to social media.

This is largely trying to take all the experiments and align them with a business purpose, trying to manage the brand online so there’s isn’t 25 different Facebook pages. Instead, there’s one voice for the brand online that is purposeful, not simply whatever the person who did the feed decided on.

There’s a measurement model around everything that’s done so they can learn from their efforts, see what’s having a business impact, what’s creating customer value, what’s helping them build brand reputation and what’s helping them sell product through social media.

Beyond this is the promised land of full integration where social media becomes a part of everyone’s job delivering greater efficiency, greater customer value, and building good culture. I’m not sure if there are too many examples of that yet.

Q: Which companies are close to getting there?

John Bell: A company in the middle of operationalizing is Ogilvy client IBM, which has a long history of applying social media internally – and is an Ogilvy client. Unilever and Proctor & Gamble really started with social media as an external marketing communications discipline.

Q: Is there a sense that a company will think, ‘We’d better open a Twitter account and Facebook page to build up people to like them and once they get negative feedback or aren’t seeing immediate business results, they’ll think it’s not worth it.

John Bell: A lot of brands reactively get involved in social media and then realise, “Now what?” Along the way to getting reactively involved, they probably haven’t built the best foundation or put thought into their conversation calendar and the online space they are going to engage with people in.

They probably haven’t thought too hard about roles and responsibilities in the organisation and goals for those people.  They’ll wake up one morning after pulling the trigger on a Facebook program and blog program and say, “Is this all there is? Is this all I get?”

You would expect them to pull out, but hopefully in most cases, they then say there must be a better way.

We can’t leave social media. We all intuitively believe it has promise for our business – if nothing else a competitive colleague insists it’s the next big thing.

So brands try to find guidance from people who talk about social media as a business driven discipline as opposed to a fluffy “get in the conversation” type-way. Hopefully they find us. We’re trying to play that role for our clients because we understand social media has tremendous potential to drive sales and impact business. But only when you marry it with the best of marketing communications discipline do you get that.

People overestimate how social media has inverted the world. I think the impact is tremendous: it will transform us, make us better marketers, better product and service developers, but it hasn’t completely rewritten the old rules from marketing communications. They remain relevant today.

The obvious starting point is for brands to deliver some authentic value to their customers. We can’t just message people because we want them to understand something and then do it a dozen times to beat them over the head. We have to try and earn their attention and involvement by figuring out what they want from our brand.

Online communities: think ‘quality NOT quantity’

Nate Cochrane pens his rules for social media etiquette on iTNews. And in a style true to the very fundamentals of social media which encourage active sharing and participation, he has made a point to list the rules he outlines as a work in progress and has opened it up for discussion on the site.

One of the rules that he points out is one that we tend to forget: ‘Quality NOT quantity’. Too often PRs get flack for doing a last minute dash to sign up as many people in their network to become friends/ fans on their clients’ Facebook groups and pages or on their Twitter handles.

As PRs, we need to continue to educate our clients that the real value does not lie in the sheer volume of people we sign up but rather in the quality of the people we engage (even if it’s only a handful!).

Consider who your target audience is, where do they frequent and how to reach them. Who is in your fans/ friends extended networks. Are they the right audience to target?

Using Twitter as an example, it’s important to do the analysis and drill down into who the person is that you want to connect with, get to know them, follow them for a while and find out what they write about. Also have a look into who follows that person, are they the appropriate person for your client to be reaching out to or is there someone in their Twitter network that is better?

The following tool can help you determine the most appropriate people to follow:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/

If we want to get some real and long lasting results for our clients, the key is to make sure that we’re speaking to the right audiences!

The scary side of Social Networking

With the popularity of social networking sites continuing to grow at massive rates, adding thousands of new users every day, we must still tread with caution. Every week we see experts step forward to advise us that platforms like Twitter and Facebook can easily ruin our reputations.

One such recent report is by Zatz Publishing’s editor-in-chief David Gewirtz, which was reported by the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog.

In the article Gewirtz says that when it comes to social networking, it’s not what you know, or even who you know, it’s who knows you. The report is aptly titled: “The Dark Side of Social Networking.”

Gerwitz adds: “social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn are the increasingly popular community services that are designed to help people stay in touch.”

The Bulldog article cites research from Nielsen Company that “more than two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking sites at least once a month, and nearly 10% of all time spent online is devoted to social networking.”

Due to this popularity and growth, and an army of undisciplined users, Gewirtz adds that “social networks are attracting scammers and criminals. The bulk of social networkers are between the ages of 18 and 49 – prime employment years, and ages where a mistake today could haunt them for many years into the future.”

Gewirtz’s report explores the following issues:

• Employment: how social networking can lead to career suicide
• Reputation: how something you say now could haunt you for years into the future.
• Malware, phishing and identity scams: how using services like Facebook and Twitter without caution could cause you serious financial loss
• Physical security and stalking: how social networks give stalkers and other scary people an almost minute-by-minute update on your habits and haunts

As for physical risks, Gerwitz says “the potential for horror is enormous. If a criminal can easily find out where you are, what stores you frequent, what your daily habits are, who your friends are, and even what your personal food, entertainment, and beverage preferences are, you can be targeted with a level of ease never before possible. I worry that there is a deep and dangerous dark side to social networks and I worry about the potential victims.”

Yikes, scary stuff. You have been warned!

(Acknowledgement: Gerwitz’s quotes and observations sources from the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog article)