Social Media Whitepapers

I found a Forrester slideshow that detailed some results from several blogs they own: including Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, and Groundswell.

While not a “white paper”, page 11 is an interesting metric that I haven’t seen elsewhere- roughly 70% of the readers subscribe through RSS. This is a very high percentage that I have seen near identical results on our own RSS count vs. web visitors (123  floats around 60-65%)

I also found that the professional categories of the readers were interesting. The two largest groups @ 22% each were Marketing and 10% Interactive Marketing. The third largest was @ 8% - “Independent Consultant”

Apparently the “movers and shakers” are the marketing and consulting folk who have bottom line responsibility and need to prove return on investment. In any case, here is the slideshare with the rest of the information (worth browsing through):

A new study from the Society for New Communications Research focuses on how social media is taking on a primary channel for brands and products. Focusing on “social media power users” (aka influencers), the report includes case studies and information from organizations such as the American Red Cross, Mayo Clinic, Blendtec, and Quicken.

“social media power users,” i.e., communications professionals with a deep knowledge and heavy usage pattern of social media tools including blogs, podcasts, online video, social
networks, and other new and emerging communications tools and technologies.”

Unfortunately the report indicates that public relations and corporate communication experts are evolving into the new media space, but I have to disagree in the fact that most communication professionals are falling behind the curve, instead of in front of it.

Overall the study is fairly well done (42 pages) and highlights some excellent data points. You can download the report for free here.

Of those organizations surveyed, 78% use blogs, 63% use online video, 56% use social networks and 49% use podcasts in their organization’s communications initiatives. The total sample size for the survey portion of the study was 297 communications professionals: 37% of whom were public relations / marketing communications professionals working within an agency, 35% of whom were in-house public relations and corporate communications professionals; 22% were public relations and marketing communications consultants; 4% worked for media companies and 2% were advertising and/or brand marketing professionals.

The research team at SNCR included:

• Joseph Carrabis- CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution
• John Cass- Online Community Manager for Forrester Research
• Paul Gillin- Author of the social media column for Business 2.0 magazine, and The New Influencers
• Richard Nacht- He is the founder and CEO of Blogging Systems
• Greg Peverill-Conti- Vice President at Weber Shandwick Public Relations

If you know of any additional social media white paper resources, please let us know about them!

Social Media Measurement is a key business criteria for on-going success. While the following slideshow is not a whitepaper, it is a very good beginner presentation surrounding the core fundamentals of monitoring a campaign.

This information may be entirely new to you or tried and tested, but an important part working within the social media space is communicating some of these bullet points and opening a conversation around them.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more.

Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation, wrote the whitepaper Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure. The basic description is best said in the introduction of the paper “A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.”

It has some excellent bullet points about participatory media on Mozilla/Firefox and Wikipedia:

Mozilla Key Takeaways

• Online, a small amount of resources can serve millions of people.
• Web-based organizations can become self-sustaining in a way that has never been possible offline. When creating a website or building software, costs do not rise linearly with the number of people served.
• Successful social tech projects can quickly transition from being grant recipients to granting organizations.

Wikipedia Key Takeaways

• Non-profit projects online can build vibrant collaborative communities of volunteers and evangelists that would have been extremely difficult and very expensive to organize offline.
• Tiny amounts of money can let smart projects reach enormous audiences.
• Avoiding some types of revenue can help protect the credibility and therefore success of certain non-profit tech projects. Revenue requirements relative to people served may be so small that perpetual grant support is the best long-term strategy.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more. The first paper covers enterprise reputation management, a paper by Toby Bell from Gartner Research.

Toby does a good job laying out some of the fundamental ideas that organizations should be bringing to the table. As we move further and further into the information age, we will see more cases of companies using online reputation and brand control covered in the Gartner paper.

Two important bullet points:

• Time scales on the internet are more compressed and the implications of a negative event can be far-reaching. In many PR and communication issues, there are days, weeks, or months to analyze and create a strategy. Social media often leaves minutes, hours, or at best days to respond.
• Social media is an unfamiliar territory for enterprises, with very different rules for engagement. From our perspective, communication professionals and web savvy marketers need to plan for the change between business to consumer, small and medium business, and enterprise communication. Companies are treated differently in the social media environment- often leaving influencers within an industry to determine the fate of how media interaction occurs.

If you are in the media space and don’t read Gartner’s papers- you should consider checking them out “Policies and Procedures to Manage Enterprise Internet Reputation“.