Presentation at Erste School of Banking and Finance. Group Lecture - Holding Series – 2011 Building Bridges in Business

1. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Group Lecture - Holding Series – 2011
Building Bridges in Business

2. Erste School of Banking and Finance
A billion target audiences of one: How social
media challenges the corporate world
Ritchie Pettauer, Media Consultant
January, 24th
2011, Event Center, Room K4, Vienna

3. Erste School of Banking and Finance
The core principles of social media
Marshall Mc Luhan:
„The medium is the message.“
and
„The medium is the massage.“
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4. Erste School of Banking and Finance
The core principles of social media
− The message is not an objective set of meaningful codes.
− The way we understand/value/rate messages is closely connected to
our relationship with the „source“.
− The more we trust in any given source, the more closely we listen to ist
messages.
− This basic principle, deeply rooted in humankind‘s cultural history, is
reflected throughout all kinds of mass-, individual- and social media.
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5. Erste School of Banking and Finance
The core principles of social media
− „Individual“ and „mass communication“ once used to be two clearly
separated fields, as the technologies which empowered and enabled
mass communication (the printing press, radio and tv) where one-way
streets.
− Digital media aka the internet introduced a completely new network
topology: a one-way street has turned into an information highway.
− Consumers become „prosumers“, market communication turns into an
extended dialogue.
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6. Erste School of Banking and Finance
The Shannon-Weaver Model
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7. Erste School of Banking and Finance
The Mesh Topology
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8. Erste School of Banking and Finance
How it all began
− The „1st generation“ internet mainly relied on static pages (HTML-
code). While the „trust factor“ established within the old media system
did play an important role in the early days, the world‘s most succesful
soon found out how to use the structure of the net itself to structure the
immense amount of available pages.
− Google‘s Pagerank algorithm relies on the hyperlinking structure of the
net to rank pages and create rankings of relevancy.
− Google‘s idea therefor also determined the visibility of information – in
less than 10 years, an algorithm replaced gatekeeping and the
traditional role media professionals as „selectors“ or „gatekeepers“.
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11. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Facebook, Twitter and the Web 2.0
− Increasing bandwidth and new technologies enabled users to actively
engange with web pages.
− There were plenty social media services before MySpace and
Facebooks: „guest books“ on personal homepages, online discussion
boards, IRC chat and newsgroups let the once-passive visitor voice his
opionions publicly.
− Yet these services mostly attracted geeks, digital natives and
professional media users. So Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and
LinkedIn did not invent „social networking“, but they turned the
paradigm of the active user into mainstream.
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12. Erste School of Banking and Finance
What is the „Social Graph“?
− Google: „The more incoming links a webpage receives, the more
relevant it is“ (to everyone)
− Facebook: „If you‘re friends are interested in a certain kind of
information, you probably want to hear about that stuff, too.“
− Google: „If you don‘t find what you‘re looking for, you didn‘t enter the
right keywords.“ (And if you don‘t know what you‘re looking for, we can‘t
help you at all.)
− Facebook: „Information will find you!“
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13. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
− Social media is fueled by dialogue between a large number of users.
People have been talking to each other for quite a while, so what‘s the
big deal?
1. The internet/social media fuels the formation of „tribes“ – groups of
people defined by similar interests, independent of geographic factors.
2. A large part of these dialogues does happen in a new „demi-public“
space: Social media quite forcefully redefines our notion of „privacy“, as
the internet tends to be a lot less forgetful than the human brain.
3. Human ressources become the main factor for digital success, as
brands usually don‘t talk.
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14. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
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15. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
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16. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
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17. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
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18. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Corporate Social Media Challenges
− Social media optimiziation is an inhouse job, as is requires skillful
experts in the field of – YOUR BUSINESS!
− Social media services are very easy to use – so it‘s not a technical
challenge or a question of skills, but internal communication /
knowledge managment.
− Social media cannot really be ignored: staying away from social media
platforms will not make users stop about your company.
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19. Erste School of Banking and Finance
Social Media
Thanks for your attention!
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