PepperDigital

"One Size Fits None": Navigating the Online Pitfalls and Opportunities of Today's Global Social Norms

Part 6 of 12

Previously in the “One Size Fits None” blog series we looked at different social media sites in various European countries. But what are the different cultural norms that lead to such a variety? At the halfway point in the blog series, we examine the cultural differences between European countries and the impact on social media.

The purpose and approach of why different European countries’ citizens use social media quickly emerges on examining their use of the tools available. In a recent study of six European countries – France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK – the French proved to be the "nosiest" nation. Fifty-three percent of French social networkers admitted that observing their peers was their primary reason for participation in social media. The French are closely followed by the Italians, at 44 per cent, and the Germans, at 43 per cent, according to the report from Survey Sampling International (SSI). 

Social media sites have become the forum through which many people conduct their social lives – it is now a more common reason to go online than checking email. The SSI survey found that 47 per cent of people visit social networking sites predominantly to interact with friends and colleagues. 

But, as in the US, the growth of social media in Europe is also down to trends such as globalisation and increasing tendency to travel. People increasingly live away from where they grew up, others move around for employment, others find personal relationships result in them living in foreign countries. 

Social media sites in Europe (listed here in a earlier post) are wise to different cultural trends, particularly in the face of established local social media players. For example, advertisers have long known that the most effective way to sell to the British is with comedy. To capitalise on this, MySpace launched a dedicated comedy channel in the UK that enables people to discover up-and-coming comedy talent. MySpace’s UK comedy channel was the first outside the US. Similarly, MySpace launched a fashion community called ‘MySpace Boudoir’ in France to help the country’s fashion community engage with one another. 

Yet successful local nuances often are not launched from above. Part of the attraction of Facebook is the ability to develop applications. An application developed around Galatasaray, a Turkish football club, has helped the country’s Facebook membership grow to 8 million people.

Beyond these differing local uses, it is clear that the biggest social networking sites also attract people for specific uses. Facebook is fast becoming a global directory, whereas MySpace is still the site any up-and-coming band will refer you to after a gig. Meanwhile, Bebo is more aggressively targeting the younger age bracket. The site has gained a loyal following for its ‘Kate Modern’ online drama, which at its peak in June 2008 attracted 2.5 million viewers a week.

It is clear then that Europe is in no way a homogenised culture and local differences have to be understood and accounted for. In the next post we will examine the impact of these differences on European business and politics.

Why Not Use Twitter to Prevent Surgery Miscues?

By Mike Blankenship, PepperDigital

Rhode Island Hospital, in Providence, was fined $150,000 by the state's Department of Health after a surgeon operated on the wrong finger of a patient in October. Ever more astonishing is that the same hospital has conducted five "wrong-side surgeries" since 2007. My first reaction is why is this hospital still open? Why hasn't the administrator been fired?

The fine levied by the Department of Health will pale in comparison to the subsequent medical malpractice suit. In addition to the fine, the hospital is going to be required to install video cameras in all operating rooms, and all surgeries will be monitored by a clinical professional--not on the surgical team--trained in surgical safety measures. Why wasn't this done after the first botched surgery?

An even simpler solution, and perhaps an added protective measure, would be to Tweet the surgical procedures. There are examples of successful surgeries that have been broadcast via Twitter, including one we wrote about here. 

Anyone who has had surgery knows that during pre-op, a nurse uses a marker to annotate which side of the body or body part is going to be cut open. Once inside the OR and on the table, the entire team, including the surgeon, discuss the procedure and everyone verbally agrees to what is going to happen and to which body part.  All of this is done prior to the administration of anesthesia.

With a Twitter protocol in place, each step can be Tweeted in detail. The OR Tweeter would provide a detailed account of the procedure, including microblogging the pre-op confirmation discussion:

@RhodeIslandHospital: Dr. Jones has just asked Jim the Patient which knee has been marked for the surgery.

@RhodeIslandHospital: Jim the Patient has confirmed that his left knee has been marked and has confirmed that his left knee is undergoing the procedure.

@RhodeIslandHospital: Dr. Jones has verbally confirmed that he will operate on the left knee. The rest of the team has verbally agreed to the left knee.

@RhodeIslandHospital: Jim the Patient is now under anesthesia. Dr. Jones is making the first incision on the left knee.

This simple Twitter feed provides an additional layer of checks and balances for an obviously screwed up surgery department at Rhode Island Hospital. What is gained by Tweeting the surgery is an additional level of oversight.  A patient's family can also follow each step of the procedure and interject with a direct reply to the OR if anything is Tweeted that is wrong. For example, in the above scenario, if any Tweet had contained "right knee" instead of "left knee," the family could have immediately sent a reply notifying the OR staff.

The other benefit of using Twitter in the OR is that it's free. Of course this requires an extra body in the room but using somebody already on your payroll is a lot cheaper than fines and malpractice lawsuits. Use a med student who is completing their surgery rotation. It could be used as a teaching tool or part of a "scared straight" initiative to demonstrate the need for situational awareness during surgery.

The Social Media Marathon

By Rob Longert, PepperDigital

Have you ever seen the New York City Marathon? It is a jaw dropping, electric and emotional day on the streets of New York City. From screaming onlookers, cheering their guts out to the smiling and sometimes grimacing runners inching to the finish line, the day winds up being one of New York’s brightest spectacles.

After the watching the race this year, I was walking through Central Park contemplating how everyday people rise above and cross that finish line, no matter how long it takes and how badly it hurts, and came to the conclusion that I want to run the marathon in the next couple of years.

What does this have to do with social media you might ask? Well actually, a lot. Running and training for a marathon is a great analogy to clients that want to step into the social media realm. 

Would it make sense to run a marathon without training? Of course not! And it also doesn’t make sense to launch a blog, Twitter presence, Facebook fan page, YouTube channel and Flickr page on the same day, without planning it out.

In the same way that the same running shoe doesn’t fit two people in the same way, one social media strategy might be really comfortable for one client and might “too tight” or “too loose” for another client.

Some folks are natural runners and they have runners’ bodies, lungs and hearts. Running comes easily to them and they barely have to try to be successful. Then there are people who need to change their body-type, through training, just to be able to finish a 5K. And the same goes for participating in conversations via social media. Some people just have a knack for it, and they can manage multiple profiles right off the bat, but others need to ease in, train and take things at a slower pace. 

But guess what? There is nothing wrong with that, at all.

Only a small percentage of people who run the marathon finish in under three hours, but the great thing about the marathon is that it doesn’t matter when you finish. What matters is that you finish, that you experience the sights and sounds of the run and that you come out of the marathon knowing more about yourself than you did before running.

The same goes for social media. Do you honestly think your brand is going to be as successful as a brand like Southwest Airlines, Comcast or Zappos.com overnight?

If you do, I suggest you run a marathon without training and see how you feel, because if you jump into social media without thinking about it, you will have a lot more to worry about than just sore legs…

"One Size Fits None": Navigating the Online Pitfalls and Opportunities of Today's Global Social Norms

Part 5 of 12

The concept of "pop cosmopolitanism" discussed in the introduction to this series provides a way of understanding how all of us increasingly experience the world not through international travel, but through the popular culture we read, watch and listen to. And, as the Internet creates new ways for popular culture to spread across international borders, these shifts are changing the climate for brands communicating with multiple national audiences. In this post, we point out how pop culture trends show shifts in communication across borders and how international audiences are impacting and influencing one another through social media and digital distribution.

Much attention in the academic space, for instance, has been given to the flow of cultural material between the U.S. and Japan. MIT professor Ian Condry has studied anime fandom and the relationships between U.S. fans and Japanese anime creators. For instance, many U.S. fans have not only become deeply interested in Japanese culture more broadly, but were distributing anime content "illegally" long before anime was considered economically viable in the U.S. The phenomenon of "fansubbing" saw these fans provide English subtitles to Japanese animation with the hope of unofficial distribution spreading the content even more widely. Eventually, that underground distribution proved a market for Japanese anime in the U.S., and its commercial viability continues to grow rapidly.

Condry has also looked at how popular culture has flowed in the opposite direction: how hip-hop has taken off in Japan with original Japanese artists and a unique Japanese flare. In his 2006 book Hip-Hop Japan, Condry looks at "globalisation" through a new light, seeing not the destroying of local culture by multinational music corporations but instead how the prevalence of hip-hop music in Japan created a unique genre, inspired by U.S. hip-hop, but uniquely Japanese.

The growing international prominence of Bollywood, K-Pop and northern European independent musicians/bands has changed the way we understand media flow across national borders. On her blog Online Fandom, University of Kansas professor Nancy Baym looks extensively at the rise in popularity of international musical acts that, in the era of "big labels," would have likely never been heard by international audiences but now have large followings outside their native country. For instance, Baym shares a story about how fans of the Norwegian band Madrugada who speak Norwegian, translate articles about them into English "so their international fan base can be as informed as they are."

Meanwhile, on YouTube, the popularity of international series saw both diasporic audiences and new international audiences alike discovering local content. For instance, thousands of videos have been posted sharing clips from the Turkish television series Binbir Gece. A particular user began splitting full episodes up into YouTube-sized bits (since the site only lets you post 10 minutes of video at a time), and the videos have generated significant discussion in most of the comments section, much of it in Turkish.

The drama MariMar demonstrates how popular culture travels across national borders. MariMar was originally a Mexican telenovella in the 1990s that became popular in the Philippines. Based on that, Philippine producers decided to create a Filipino version of MariMar in 2007. MariMar thus became a highly distributed property on YouTube, again with thousands of videos including both the Mexican original and the more recent Filipino version.

As Peppercom’s Sam Ford has previously written, "Just browsing YouTube's 'Most' pages can help media producers, media scholars, and interested media consumers catch some of the most popular trends of cultures they might not necessarily have the pulse of, and likewise discover other niches of the 'YouTube community' that prove that the diversity of uses and users on such a site is more decentralised and varied than a word like 'community' would lead one to believe. So, while millions of views are dedicated to popular American television content and the latest online vlog wars, remember that there are a variety of other fandoms and uses of YouTube, like the ones I've outlined here."

All of these examples point out that who "makes" content and who "consumes" content is contested through the lens of "pop cosmopolitanism." As public relations professionals think about how information and culture is distributed internationally, especially in an era where the power of traditional media is declining, following these pop culture trends becomes especially important for realising how much the industry has and will be changing in the years ahead. 

Happy Birthday To Me!

By Brooke Winebrenner, Pepperdigital

Last week, I celebrated my 24th birthday. Now I realize this year does not mark a special milestone in life, but nonetheless it was my day. Overall, I would say it was much like many other birthdays in the past, or was it? 

As the day came to an end, I was caught off guard at the realization that I had only received 2 phone calls from loved ones wishing me a Happy Birthday. The dozens of other birthday greetings were sent to me via emails, texts, tweets and Facebook wall posts and direct messages from extended family, as well as close and long lost friends. Now I don’t know about you, but 5 years ago this would have never happened. My phone would have been ringing off the hook and I would have received a handful of birthday cards.

While experts have repeatedly stated that social media is changing the way we communicate with one another, on a personal level, it really hit home. Is it that hard to pick up the phone and give someone a call? Maybe for some, but no, I don’t think that is the case. I believe this is a result of the level of comfort we have all begun to develop through social media. Communicating through these outlets has become the norm, day in and day out. So, silly me, why would I ever think that my special day would be an exception to these communication platforms? 

Maybe if I would have read Mashable.com’s: Top 5 Ways Social Media is Changing Our Daily Lives before my birthday, then I wouldn’t have been caught off guard. I think it is important for everyone to take the time to reflect on how our lives are continually changing overtime in result of social media. Below, please find an excerpt from Mashable’s Top 5 Ways Social Media is Changing Our Lives:

1. Where We Get Our News

News has become more social than ever. While many people still use RSS feeds to stay up up-to-date on publications of interest and blogs, our list of sources for what is worthy of our attention has expanded substantially. Many of us have begun to look to our friends and the people we recognize on social networks like Facebook and Twitter for recommended news. This makes it easy to communicate with one another about this information.

2. How We Start and Do Business

It is easier than ever to start and launch a business today, in great part thanks to social media. Social media, including everything from blogging to posting videos on YouTube to tweeting, has brought about unlimited opportunities for both consumers and clients. Who we do business with and how we promote that business has moved increasingly online, and for small business especially, social media has proved valuable. A recent article in the New York Times concluded, “For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing.”

3. How We Meet and Stay in Touch with People

Studies show that our time on social networks has nearly tripled in the last year, and while Facebook has always primarily centered around connecting with people and staying in touch with friends, according to a study on eMarketer, “41.6% percent of Internet users who used Twitter did so to keep in touch with their friends.” People certainly still meet others at social venues like clubs and parties, but it is easier than ever to discover people who share our interests through social media, whether that means via groups on Facebook or following people on Twitter. Of course, there is only so much communication that can happen through a social network, but via Tweetups and other in-person events, people are expanding these online interactions to face-to-face meetings. 

4. What We Reveal

We now have queens acknowledging that they get nervous at times when speaking, CEOs being more honest and at times using blogs to express reservations over past decisions, and people openly sharing personal views on social issues. Of course, what we decide to reveal and when to reveal it can be delicate, and there will always likely be items we wish to keep private. However, rather than working to hide our thoughts and feelings, social media is helping to create greater personal transparency. The paradigm is now no longer to try to appear perfect, but to be more transparent with your thoughts and feelings, to reveal your humanness.

5. What We Can Influence

So-called mainstream media is no longer always the driving influencer of public opinion. On Twitter, some individuals now have a million or more followers, Facebook Pages can also have hundreds of thousands of fans, and YouTube videos can get millions of views when they go viral. Most of this content is coming from regular people, rather than big, corporate-owned media organizations.  As the networks for sharing and amplifying information strengthen, the ability of each person to influence public opinion and policies increases. As a result, we feel much less like passive bystanders and much more like participants who have a voice in the events in our world.

"One Size Fits None": Navigating the Online Pitfalls and Opportunities of Today's Global Social Norms

Part 4 of 12

The title of this blog series is “One Size Fits None,” and nowhere is that more true online than in the Asia-Pacific region, where wildly varying levels of Internet access impacts who is using social media. Part four of “One Size Fits None” looks at the detail of who is doing what online in the region.

Online markets vary tremendously in the huge and massively diverse Asia-Pacific region, and, therefore, so does social media usage. Singapore and South Korea, for instance, enjoy some of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world, at 69 percent and 76 percent respectively. On the other hand, in Indonesia, only about 10 percent of the population have Internet access. Moreover, broadband penetration rates are also high in the more developed Asian countries. For instance, 60 percent of households in Japan have a broadband connection, while in South Korea that figure is a staggering 97 percent.

One common trait of social media users in Asia is that they tend to be young and tech-savvy. They are also generally better educated and in a higher economic class than their peers, an especially pronounced divide in developing markets.  

In China, for example, social media users are much more likely to live in big cities than rural areas (50 percent of the population in big cities has Internet access) and have higher education levels (9 out of 10 college-educated Chinese have Internet access). In India, too, they represent the wealthier and more educated part of society; 37 percent have a college degree, and 40 percent are students. It is perhaps not surprising that those who would have the resources to obtain a higher level of education also have the easiest access to Internet connections.

Moreover, social media users in India are more likely to be young men: more than 73 percent of all Internet users are male, and 80 percent of social network users are in the 15–30 age group. And as many as 22 percent work in the country’s strong IT industry.   

As for who is creating content in China, it tends to be younger people, with 61 percent of 16–28 year-olds claiming to blog, have their own web pages, upload videos and post articles, compared to 40 percent overall. They are also much more likely to post opinions about products (67 percent of that younger age group do so). More than 70 percent of them manage their social networking page at least once a week, according to media solutions firm Universal Mccann. Forty-seven percent of Chinese users (compared to 28 percent in the US), comment on blogs or forums. In addition, 180 million regularly view online video content, and 74.3 percent of Chinese users have downloaded a podcast; more than 27 percent download them every day and 43 percent every week, according to the New York-based Mobile Marketing Association. 

While it might be tempting to assume that there are ‘demographics’ that can be targeted in this region, such as the educated, urban youth market, it is dangerous to adopt a “one size” approach for such a vast region. Moreover, as we shall see later on in the blog series, there are particular cultural differences in this region that necessitate a particularly tailored approach.