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I am putting in this link of the You Tube video of the Susan Boyle moment that has been watched more then 100 million times!!

Why do I have to put in a link? Because I cannot embed the video anymore!!

How illustrative!  This is the way traditional media parties are dealing with social media reality!

While Simon Cowell and Fremantle smartly directed there little but Oh soo precious treasure very carefully into the spotlight (the Boyle performance was already taped in January of this year) they completely “forgot” to set up a strategy that would enable and monetize on the moment in our today social media reality!

Jenkins has a very informative post on Boyle. He calls this kind of swarming of media content “spread” with which he points out there needs to be a motif for fans to want to post, link and twitter about the Susan Boyle moment

I cannot agree more, a good crossmedia design needs to motivate people to start acting upon. His post is very interesting and his arguments for people to start ‘spreading’ are understandable: People having a ‘sense of discovery’ with the video, or ‘the uplifting nature of the moment to give to others’. He points out that ‘the meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other’. Jenkins asserts everybody may have different motives to start spreading the Boyle video, because the arguments they give friends and relatives to watch may differ depending on who you are sending messages to.

That may very well be so, but his arguments do not explain the unifying reason why this particular moment is spreading.. So what I find an even more interesting question is: What IS the binding nature of the Susan Boyle moment that makes all these different people want to start spreading?

I think the magic lies in the old metaphor of Cinderella, sleeping beauty, the princess awakening. That coupled with seeing this very everyday woman, “deprived” of any good luck, that finally did get her break-through DESPITE being too old and not in line with “beauty-prescripts”. Now imagine how many people feel mirrored in that image? And I assure you; they will not tell you out loud.

Exactly this contrast makes her a dream to any producer and Simon Cowell knew exactly what a precious gem he was holding. There was only one-way to launch her and that was trough a format like “Britain’s got talent”.

Take away all prejudice in one shot.!! Marvellous, brilliant from a classical television and music producers’ perspective.

But what an incredible loss in creating social media advantage!

Let me sum up the losses here:

I am not able to “own” the moment as a fan anymore (since I am not allowed to embed)

I am not able to make my own fan blog, helping to spread the word about who is Susan Boyle..

Can you do this in a better way?

Recently I have been working on a social media player for Dutch public broadcasting to be able to DO capture these moments and support and enable them as much as possible in today’s social media reality.

Where the BBC i-player is much credited for being innovative, this player is designed to take things leaping even more forward. Being able to grab the content and even pick up your own fragments and off course embed them everywhere.

I was wondering what would have happened if the Susan Boyle moment was accessible to the public from such a player.

Mind you, this player accounts for all views, inside the website as well as embedded anywhere else. Besides probable load balancing problems there would also be You Tube to air the moment as well (that’s what You Tube is for).

But what if the quality of the “official” player will be HD. What if you can do as much and even more with it whatever you want?

I think there really may be a substantial part of the audience choosing for the official player then.

Now let’s look at the potential commercial losses (most painfully as always )

Right after the program is aired:

1. Have an embeddable player (counting streams) available on your official website. Remember: Here YOU control every layer, all the cross-branding, pre-roll/mid-roll/post-rolls. On the web still the commercial rules are different from the television rules (which in this case. Britain’s got talent is a non-commercial television environment)

2. Right after the program, enable the moment to be captured on You Tube (just place it), with an i-tunes overlay offering the whole performance (from the moment she gets on stage to the moment she hears she’s got the vote)

3. Have available all kinds of little widgets containing snippets of that moment.. (Sponsored by.) That I can take away on my mobile phone.

Off course the Susan Boyle moment is staged extremely carefully (Oh. I’m sorry if you really thought this was spontaneous.) But it illustrates very strongly how traditional media just do not capture the power of the social media reality yet. And how the Susan Boyle moment forms a marker for how television has already changed profoundly.

In 1997, the old days, even before the internet bubble burst (yes I was on the scene already) I once, being a serious telecommunication consultant, had to write my input for a greenpaper on telecommunication and media for the OPTA. To give a north star I just wrote down some simple statements. One of them was

“Not reach but relevance will be key”.

And now, more then ten years down the road I think it is time to restate that prediction a little bit as in “Not reach but relevance IS the key”. What I mean obviously is that “reach” as in GRP or CPM or any other measure of short attention/contact is not a sole indicator of the effect of your communication anymore. The difference between the prediction in 1997 and today is that in my point of view we already passed the stage where it is effective to build your media strategy around aiming at as much reach as possible. But still I am amazed how most of the advertising budget most of the publishers claiming to be “crossmedia publishers” and most of the media agencies are still taking as a centre piece of their strategies.. ‘to gain as much ‘reach’ for a brand/product as is possible’.

Here’s why that is a counterproductive strategy for your brand to say the least..:

Before customers got voices, and media where still about sending and calling out as loud as you can, you could not see the bottom of the iceberg. So all the time, we just said to each other, see how great we are doing. See how many people we have reached with our message….. And see what it did to the awareness of our brand. And see how sales have increased by 10 percent. The campaign is a huge success…

But that really is just the tip of the iceberg…

The piece in the water is the amount of NEGATIVE effect/affect you get when you focus on getting as much reach as you can. The top of the iceberg is where a small amount of customers, who might just be thinking about buying your kind of product or service, or maybe they where not, but got persuaded by the coolness of your campaign and the clever repetition of your media plan and gave attention to your product or brand.

But….The bottom of the iceberg represents the cost of irritating the rest of your public with irrelevant messages. And if you make up that balance, it is a negative one!

And still, how many times a day do we get advertising messages that are completely irrelevant to us. Mostly we do not get irritated anymore, we just ignore the messages completely often never even realizing there was a message at all. (Well, maybe it has some effect, if you believe in the strength of subliminal messaging…) But the costs remain the same, either be it plain waste, or irritation. Your message is completely irrelevant to the people you want to ‘reach’. It never touched any core of their existence, never resonated on any string.

So, basically you did not do well at all! It’s a painful message if you are still out there building media campaigns to get as much reach as you can (and I know most of you are still doing this….). The problem with this approach is, you are sailing under another sky then the one we live in today.

Getting relevant is a completely different act. It means
1. Adding true value through meaningful touchpoints in the lives of people.
2. Being context-aware One context isn’t the other, so something can be meaningful in one context, of no value in another and completely off-beat in another context. Be aware of being context-aware.
3. Helping out your customers, with getting their lives better organized, more meaningful, more fun, more inspiring, more true.
4. Authenticity and openness Be true. Recently I was trying to pull of a stunt in one of the big ranting blogs in the Netherlands (http://www.geenstijl.tv). And obviously the public right away saw the acting, and most of the negative comments on my ‘performance’ where about it NOT being authentic (.. I admit, it wasn’t
5. Being just in time JIT is a term used in the vending business, meaning that goods are delivered not a moment to early and not a moment too late. This very much accounts for your context-aware communication. Be prepared to communicate on different levels with different persons in your public. Someone might be just exploring your product or service. While another is on the step of actually buying it. The first needs to be able to ‘play around’ while the next one needs a lot of confirmation if he or she is making the right choice. Those are ‘different messages at ‘different times’ in the dialogue you have with your customers.
6. Time is personal not chronological. Coming from the last remark in the previous point.. People are at different personal “time’ levels in a dialogue. All taking place in parallel. Steering all of these parallel dimensions is one of the arts of getting relevant.

I can name a few others, and I will in following posts when I get back on how to get a better grasp at these key indicators. But there is one main attitude change that needs to happen:

START LISTENING (and stop shouting… because you really are looking more ridiculously unaware every day)