A recent HitWise report reveals that overall market share of social networking sites has decreased by 20% over the last 12 months. An article at BizReport.com has cited the report by Hitwise (a visitor metrics company) and used the headline ‘Is Social Networking Dead or Dying?’. I can’t find the original point of reference on the Hitwise site, but the BizReport.com article states that the number of visits to social networking sites has fallen. It then goes on to point out that this might actually be because people are spending more time on their favourite site rather than jumping to and from a bunch of them (which would rack up the number of visits from unique users, but isn’t a true indication of popularity).

It’s a beat-up, but if you step back from the hyperbole and gaze at the bigger picture, it could well be that the excitement has died down and social networking has hit its high-water mark. Could it be that everyone in the western world who wants to have a MySpace or Facebook account now does and that those that do are using them less? Are the steep growth curves of the social media giants about to even out?

My gut instict is yes.

What does this mean?

A: The fad is over.

People who signed up to Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and LinedIn have played around furiously for a while, but like hoola-hoops, roller skates, slinkys, Pokemon, yo-yos, slap bands, Alf and The Olsen Twins, they’re now starting to lose interest. I don’t think they’ll relegate social networking to the bottom of the toy-box just yet, but I think you’ll definitely see less ferventness, which is exactly what that HitWise report is showing.

If I owned Facebook, I’d be selling out now. Watch for an announcement in the next few months, before the capitalists realise there ain’t as much money in it as everyone thought. And don’t even get me started on fucking Twitter.

Have you ever wished you could find out everything people were saying about your company in blogs, forums, online media and on third-party websites? Better still, have you ever wished you could be notified via email when new information or comments about your company are published anywhere on the world wide web?

Media Monitors offer a paid service which is great if you like being sent newspaper clippings to stick in scrapbooks (scrapbooking is very popular these days). But did you realise that Google offer a very similar thing for free? It’s called Google alerts. It won’t send you dead trees, but it will email you any time the keywords of your choice appear on the web. It’s dead simple, and dirt cheap. Use it. Now.

I was in Melanesia last week, chiefly to climb a volcano, but also to have a good long chat about marketing strategy with Stuart Mathison, who is the Head of Operations of the National Bank of Vanuatu. Stuart is a client of ours and he’s got a problem. He is responsible for running an (underfunded) government-owned organisation that is duty bound to provide a loss-making service to a rural nation, but he also has to compete for profit in the cities (where the money is) with a bunch of foreign-owned banks that have a virtually limitless PR budget and advertising spend. Stuart has a brilliant brand with some amazing stories (for example, their mobile banking reps travel on speedboats to reach isolated island villages), but in order to get the message out there he’s got to find some innovative and alternate ways of reaching his audience because he hasn’t got the money to compete with ANZ and Westpac. What he is going to do will make an interesting blog post one day, but it’s too early to say too much just yet.

It got me thinking though. The kinds of innovative marketing strategies the National Bank of Vanuatu are going to have to put in place aren’t that different from the kinds of strategies that can be employed by underfunded government organisations around the world. One of those that is quite dear to my heart is Australia’s national youth broadcaster Triple J. When I started this blog I had a long list of things I was going to write about, one of which was going to be a series of posts on how to use digital strategy to market a range of different organisations circa 2008. ‘Bank’ was on that list, and I’ll get there one day, but I think a more interesting post for the moment would be ‘how to market Triple J’.

Triple J is the youth arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, encompassing a national radio station, some TV shows, a magazine and a number of websites. It has a lot of diehard fans and a national audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, but in an era where iPods, online file-sharing and YouTube have become the kids’ tools of choice for finding and experiencing music and entertainment, Triple J’s marketing team has its back against the wall. It needs to fight back, and it needs to change the way it operates.

Triple J’s aim is not to win the ratings war, and it shouldn’t be, but the more people it can reach, the better it will achieve its goals under the ABC charter, namely: encouraging and promoting music and the arts, informing and entertaining the youth of the country and contributing to a sense of national identity that reflects Australia’s cultural diversity. The yardstick shouldn’t be ears listening to any particular radio program or eyeballs viewing a show, it should be how well the organisation achieves its goals. It goes without saying that it has a much better chance of achieving those goals successfully if it can win over people who aren’t currently paying attention.

There are a number of groups of people who aren’t currently paying attention and Triple J’s marketing and branding goals should be to wake them up, they are:

• People who listen to competing stations and consume other competing media
• People who listen to their iPods (and digital radio) instead of FM radio
• People who consume online media instead of magazines and TV
• People who currently listen to Triple J, but not as often as others
• Bands and solo artists

And of course, that’ s not to mention the need to keep existing listeners and viewers informed.

Here’s what I think Triple J should be doing for each of those groups…

People who Listen to Competing Stations and Consume Other Competing Media

No matter how good Triple J’s bumper stickers are (‘It was either this or a Jesus fish’ was one great example), no matter how much media attention the (brilliant) ‘Beat the Drum’ competition gets and no matter how many promos Triple J runs for itself over the airwaves and on ABC TV, it’s not going to make any significant impact on those who are currently listening to competing stations and consuming competing media. For these people, it’s a matter of programming choice and content. The only way you can make them change the dial is to change their taste.

It’s possible to change people’s taste, but it’s hard.

Fashion changes because Hollywood celebrities are paid to wear the latest trends, and the cool people (the trend-setters in their social group) pick up on them. Eventually the styles find their way in to mainstream department stores like Target when managers are comfortable that a style has become middle-of-the-road enough to sell in large quantities, but by the time they do, the cool people have moved on. Music works in much the same way; a few artists out on the cutting edge set the new trend and eventually, mainstream radio picks up on it, but not before something newer and cooler has come along. It’s Triple J’s job to be at that cutting edge, to find the new music and test the waters, and for that reason you’re never going to hear Triple J playing in Target. However, Triple J should be pushing harder to get played in more clothing stores, more cafes, and more shops where the trend-setters are listening. Triple J should be using use social media to reach people like Cam Hill with more innovative approaches – it should be using the cult of celebrity to use its personalities as brand ambassadors who connect directly with their audience. Zan Rowe is doing a great job with her blog, and Marieke Hardy has only recently shut up shop, but a lot more could be done.

Sponsoring gigs and festivals is excellent brand re-enforcement, but I doubt it’s doing much to win over people who aren’t already listening. You still need to preach at the choir, but you need better evangelism if you’re going to reach the masses.

People who Listen to their iPods (and Digital Radio) Instead of FM Radio

Over 150 million iPods have been sold, white earbuds are ubiquitous on public transport and these days even budget car manufacturers are installing MP3 player docks as standard accessories. Record labels have virtually given up trying to fight P2P file sharing and virtual stations like Last.FM, Yahoo Music and MySpace are increasing listenership at astonishing rates. People who know what they are talking about are claiming that music radio is dead.

As music industry commentator Bob Lefsetz put it:

“Radio listenership has been declining for years.  Is it coming back? You now hear about music from your friends.  Or in chat rooms, blogs or other virtual worlds.  Every band known to man has a MySpace site where you can experience its wares … in an era where you can pull up a station’s playlist on the Net, why do you have to actually listen (to the airwaves)…”

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently spoke with some unique insight on  the future of radio as well and it’s well worth reading.

The fact is, Generation Y doesn’t listen to radio like their parents (or even their older cousins) did. They know how to get (almost) every song in the world online for free and if they want to hear something new radio is the last place they need to look. In our office there are nine people and I usually get to work before all of them. As everyone arrives in the morning I watch everyone over 25 tune in their radio and everyone under 25 either plug in their iPod, or cue up MySpace.

FM radio can’t compete with digital media if it wants to reach Generation Y.

The station is lucky it doesn’t have to try and sell ad slots over airwaves to survive; it can innovate and it can do so quickly, long before competitors Austereo and DGM wake up to the stark reality of the situation. Streaming popular shows online is a good start, as is the excellent Unearthed website. But so much more can be done. I’d like to see an audit of the Unearthed website to see how many people are actually streaming music regularly. I’d then like to see what happened if the site was opened up so that artists with record deals could stream their music too. My guess is that if Triple J got serious about streaming more popular music online it would quickly become a market leader and win back those people who stopped listening to traditional FM radio long ago. If Triple J put all Australian music in one spot people wouldn’t need to use MySpace or Last FM as their radio station.

People who Consume Online Media Instead of Magazines and TV

The same principles apply to this group as they do to those people who’ve stopped listening to traditional FM radio. Triple J needs to become a much better digital content aggregator. Heywire and the Triple J forums are great examples, but I’d be curious to look and learn from some figures and see just how effective and popular they have been.

Triple J has to learn that putting  more content from JMag online won’t cannibalise sales of the printed version, they’ll enhance it and increase the reach of the J brand. People still (for the moment at least) want good-quality hard-copy magazines to read on the train, on the bus, on a plane and at the beach. If they want online entertainment they’ll go to YouTube, they won’t bother reading long articles, and if they do go online to read long articles, giving them more of J Mag online will encourage them to buy the next edition of the paper copy next time they’re waiting for that train/bus/plane. I’m willing to be wrong about this, but I’m pretty certain I’m right. Others agree with me.

People who Currently Listen to Triple J, but not as Often as Others

I’ve been listening to Triple J since 1994 when I was 14 years old and it first came to the small town on the NSW South Coast where I grew up. Not once has the ABC asked why. I can’t remember the last time the station did a survey into what their listeners were doing, what else they were listening to and what would make them listen to Triple J more.

Is Triple J sure the current music selection is hitting its mark (I happen to think it is, but they should be asking)? Is there a more appropriate time for a half-hour youth-orientated current affairs program than 5.30pm when the bulk of the nation’s working population are driving home from their jobs and in the mood to relax? Do people want to play the station at work (or in their café or shop) but can’t because their bosses don’t like the swearing? Are kids listening to Triple J in secret because their parents don’t like the content?

People who listen to Triple J ‘a little bit’ are the low-hanging fruit. They’re the ones who are most easily plucked for the richest rewards. The station needs to find out what it can do to make them listen more.

Bands and Solo Artists

Significant airplay on Triple J can make or break an artist’s career – read Wikipedia’s summary on that if you don’t believe me. Bands that get a break on Triple J praise the station loudly and often: Those that don’t criticize its lack of transparency. Artists are potentially the best and most vocal brand ambassadors the station has. They have the power to tell people to listen, watch, and read, so they need to understand how the station’s programming works. As an organistion with enough influence to make (or perhaps break) their dreams, Triple J has a huge responsibility to treat them with care and respect, it shouldn’t be lefty to a third party website like JPlay to be the information disseminator.

The Unearthed website is a brilliant avenue of communication between the 10,000+ listed unsigned artists and the station, but there are so many more bands, singers and songwriters with minor (and major) record and publishing deals achieving success around the country who aren’t eligible to be on the site that have no idea why their music isn’t on Triple J. It’s not reasonable to expect that station management provide individual feedback to every single one of them, but it seems strange that there can’t be an unearthed-style website available for everyone, whether they have signed a piece of paper or not. Every band under the sun streams their music for free at MySpace, Triple J should be providing the same opportunity under its own banner – I’m certain that Australian artists would embrace the Triple J brand, which has done so much for Australian music in the past, over Rupert Murdoch’s multinational goliath. If you could make Triple J the source for online Australian music you would kick every marketing goal under the sun.

While they’re at it, is there any reason why Triple J can’t offer artists the ability to sell their tracks online and take a small commission from the proceeds? Is there a reason Triple J can’t become the iTunes of Australian music and MAKE some money in the precess? I realize there are commercial regulations at play, but if it can sell Hottest 100 CDs, promote music festivals, support tours, promote gigs, sell ads in their magazine and feature albums each week, all of which lead to considerable commercial gain for the parties involved, surely there’s some sort of workaround to helping Australian artists sell their music online? There’s a desperate need out there for a place where independent artists can sell their music (or give away for a donation like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are doing). If you provided that mechanism you’d get every Australian artist on side you’d have a hugely powerful army of brand ambassadors working for you.

Keeping Existing Listeners/Viewers Informed

I won’t go into too much detail about how Triple J can better keep existing listeners and viewers informed because the existing marketing and communication strategies are pretty good. As a media outlet they can do all the internal promotion they like on radio, in print, online and on TV. They could probably do an audit of how many people are reading the emails they send out, what the magazine circulation is, how effective their Facebook and MySpace presence is, what the effective reach of festival and gig sponsorshop is, and what sections of the website are most popular, but I’m presuming all the appropriate tracking mechanisms and metrics are in place and this is a no-brainer.

In Summary

Triple J has done more for the Australian music industry than any other organisation I can think of. Like the National Bank of Vanuatu they have some amazing stories to tell, but they have to compete against some hugely powerful (albeit diminishing) commercial organisations who watch their every move, piggy-back on their successes and then poach their best talent. Triple J should be using its advantage and irreverence to innovate and start staking new ground. I’m not claiming to know the organisation’s needs inside-out, but there’s some little seeds they can start planting now that will in all likelihood grow into much bigger things in years to come.

I’m off to Vanuatu for a week to talk strategy with a client. That’s what I’m telling the taxman anyway (ssh). We have just finished building their National Bank’s website, but in reality I’ll be climbing volcanos and snorkelling. I’ve thought about online marketing and not much else since Christmas so I’m looking forward to a break.

Given that one of the islands I’m staying on doesn’t even have electricity it’s going to be pretty easy to forget about the digital world. I can’t wait. In fact it will be the first time I’ve been somewhere without electricity for a good few years. Roughing it is always a good way to get new perspective on your business goals. That’s definitely what I’m telling the tax man.

Yesterday there was a massive outage with Optus that affected pretty much all of Queensland. Phone lines were down, flights were delayed, shops couldn’t use their EFTPOS machines, businesses had no Internet, loved ones couldn’t get in touch, hospitals had no phones, people couldn’t dial ‘000′. In short, it was a bigger PR disaster than having a senior executive tell people he wouldn’t recommend your company’s shares to his mother. Optus’s strap line is ‘Yes’; yesterday it was ‘no’.

I wrote a blog post about it yesterday. I wasn’t doing it to have a whinge, in fact I really didn’t care that much, I’m Australian, I know shit happens, but I did want to see how long it took for coverage of the incident to reach search engine results and I was keen to see what Optus’s reaction was.

The ABC published an article on their website and within 15 minutes of the article going live it was appearing on the first page of Google’s results when I searched for ‘Optus down’. My own blog post was there within half an hour. The ABC and I beat all the other news outlets to the story and both our pages are still there in Google (and I’m willing to bet that this post will hang around for a while to). Optus is yet to mention anything about the outage on their website, in fact they haven’t even issued a media release about it.

The public’s reaction has been furious. Onine news articles were flooded with angry comments, forums were ablaze; hell, people even started venting their fury in my blog. It didn’t look good for Optus, but if they’d had their wits about them, there was plenty they could have done to off-set the negative effects.

What should they have done?

Traditionally speaking, they should have at least issued some media statements about the situation quick f’ing smart — the golden rule of crisis management is to control the situation; if the public are getting their information from you you can control the message. I learnt from the ABC that journalists were trying to get in touch with the company for official comment from 8.30am, but it was 8.30pm last night before they published a story with comment from Optus spokeswoman Maha Krifhnapillai. As a customer I wasn’t happy about their silence - they’re a communications company for goodness sake. That’s by-the-by though, this blog isn’t about tradition.

What Optus will be living with now, and for years to come, will be the search engine results legacy of their PR disaster. Posts like this one will survive for years when people search for ‘Optus sucks’ (so far there are 64,900 others, and counting), and posts like the one I wrote yesterday will hang around when people search for ‘Optus down’, not to mention the 78,000 results that appear when you search for ‘Optus outage’.

If I were Optus I’d be taking control of the search engine results. I’d be publishing pages on the official Optus website that are tailored to appear at the top of Google when people search for ‘Optus outage’, ‘Optus sucks’ and ‘Optus down’; I’d be explaining that their up-time is actually bloody good, I’m sure they have some excellent figures to back it up.

Unfortunately, if you look to Google for information on their company, you’re going to get a very different story. In fact, when it comes to digital strategy and online marketing, Optus sucks.

Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.

A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.

Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.

NineMSN are giving away prizes if you use their search instead of Google’s. The concept is simple: for a few weeks you can go to their secret search page, (which is different from their normal search page) enter some words into the search field, hit the search button and as your results are displayed, some little poker machine-style spinny things show you if you’ve won a prize. This happens every time you search. You get more chances at winning if you make it your homepage and more still if change your default browser search to theirs. It’s a great campaign and very nicely done, I like what they’re trying to achieve (ie. after using their search for a few weeks you’ll realise it’s pretty good, so you won’t bother going back to Google). It’s well-executed, clever and ticks lots of boxes. It won’t work for me because I realise my chances of winning a prize I actually want are dismal, I love the search results I get from Google and I hate the advertising on NineMSN, but that’s not the point.

The point is how I heard about this campaign.

It was here.

Not from NineMSN, not from a media release, not from a banner ad, not from a promo in Internet Explorer, not from a news article, not from a popup window. It was from a cool blog by an 18-year-old university marketing student. That’s the real power of social media. This is the core. This is the buzz. If your brand is interesting, people like Zac Martin will start talking about it, and people like me will start listening. Not because the message is forced upon me, not because anyone got paid to do anything, just because it was interesting.

Be interesting.

Don’t think outside the square.

Think outside the circle.

…you’ll make more money.

I don’t want to be one of those ‘I saw an article today’ bloggers, but, I saw an article today. It was at news.com.au and it was talking about how employers have “backflipped” on Facebook and want employees to use it. It was in the business section under ‘innovation’ — I had to chuckle.

“EMPLOYERS have backflipped in the way they view social networking sites at work. More than one in four managers now embrace the use of MySpace and Facebook as “untapped” business opportunities, research revealed today,” the article read.

What a crock of shit.

Here’s what happened: Journalist, Rebecca Beisler (I’m sure she’s lovely, but today wasn’t her day), received a press release from a corporation who did a ’survey’. It sounded interesting. Rebecca cut and pasted three paragraphs from the press release and then figured she’d better call some other people to get their opinion.

Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos said this:

“The internet is set to have an even more profound impact on business. The digital revolution is only beginning to be felt.”

Well fuck me.

RMIT ‘digital expert’ Mark Gregory said this:

“People like to use these sites and tell people what they’re doing. It gets them some happiness and more morale for employees.”

As a university representative you’d think Mark could get some more happiness into his grammar.

What this article really says is that 75% of managers surveyed don’t think social networking has a place at work and 25% of them think there’s probably some sort of untapped opportunity there but they don’t understand enough about it to know what it is, so maybe if they let Gen Y kids play on Facebook on their lunchbreak they’ll figure something out, or at the very least, not quit and go work somewhere else where they can play on Facebook on their lunch break.

If you want to make social media like Facebook and MySpace work for you (as opposed to business networking tools like LinkedIn), you need to figure out how to make it impossible for Cam Hill not to say good things about your brand to his friends (even, gasp, his ones from real life) and you need to understand that employees playing on Facebook at lunch are just like teenagers at the mall.

Don’t believe the hype.

OK, so you’ve got yourself a blog, congratulations! You’re blogger #50,000,001, welcome to the fold; I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m presuming you’ve got a pretty little orange RSS icon on your site somewhere so people can subscribe to your wisdom and/or ranting? Good. If not, get one, syndication is kinda’ the whole point.

…Except; do you know how many people: a) know what that icon does and b) know how to use it?

Answer: 2

If you’re going to go to the trouble of writing a blog, make it easy for EVERYONE to get your content; provide an email option. If you don’t know how, go to Feedburner. You’ll be far more popular that way.