Organisations to watch
15 October 2006, 5:31 PM (Last edited: 15 October 2006, 5:31 PM)
Why these? Social or anti-social media/technologists? You decide.
What do these organisations matter to us? Because it’s a category error to think of them as technology and media companies. Now that technology and media are social and insinuated into the fabric of our lives, these people are defacto agents of social, cultural and political change.
Here are three reasons why we’re looking at these companies:
1. What they do indirectly affects the very fabric of our lives. Ever wondered what the link is between memeorandum and techmeme? Technology is politics carried on by other means
2. What these companies do directly affects the blogosphere and its interests and so the blogosphere is rightly obsessed by them
3. Because what the blogosphere thinks is of signal importance to these guys and so the conversation does really cuts both ways.
IBM
Has a blogging policy which is almost totally proscriptive>
News Corporation
Owns MySpace today and your space tomorrow?
Ford
Made some 'Bold Moves' with video, but doesn't seem to have learned anything else from Scoble
Sony
Is the Playstation3 proof that Microsoft has finally succeeded in getting the electronics giant to take its eyes off the ball
Samsung
Watch out, these may be the new Sony today, but they might be the News Corporation of tomorrow
Things like The Nokia Game might encourage you to believe that these people were pioneers in social media. But what happened?
Nokia
BBC Online News
BBC loves blogs but would they dare to employ a blogger (like Scoble) who'd publicly criticise them?
A baptism of fire in using a blog as a 'single point of contact' for public ('one to many') customer response, they are learning the hard way that a blog is not the ideal (or at least the easiest) place to have a naked conversation.
The boss of BT is a director of legendary reality TV pioneers Endemol, but this still doesn't explain why the BT blog makes so little effort to change BT's Big Brother image.
Their exciting move of installing 'fibre to the home' looked for a moment like it would suddenly allow the US to catch up with it's Asian 'cheap gigabit-broadband' rivals: then they told us the price and spec…yawn…and the revolution was postponed
Richard Branson is one of those rare entrepreneurs that people tend to trust repeatedly with new ventures. Is it PR or substance which builds this kind of trust?
The PR industry believes Shell stumbled upon the future of PR but has Shell learned anything about this themselves?
If Scoble had a mountain to climb tackling Microsoft's image problems, these guys, who brought us GM foods, make that job look like a molehill. You don't want to be hated? You gotta share your pain, acknowledge your shortcomings, support your critics and stop doing things in a way which makes the haters right to hate you. The old PR won't cut it.
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