Don't sue social networking sites if you know what's good for you

Stan Beer
Monday, 29 October 2007 14:32

Opinion and Analysis

"The interactive nature of the media now means that interactions are transparent to a wide audience, and the flow of the dialogue needs to be actively managed. It is not a 'fire and forget' media. Active monitoring and follow up is required to ensure that the desired message is created and if necessary additional content and comments added to the interaction to keep the messaging on track.

"A good way to think of this is to imagine all the material that exists on the internet about yourself. 'Google' yourself and see what you find. If you find material that you don't like you typically cannot delete it (unless it is on your own website!)

"The best defence is active offence - by publishing new 'desirable' media that is more current than the old material.

"Most searches operate, in practice, on a last-in-first-out basis - with the most recent and popular material tending to filter to the top. Few people scroll past the first few pages of search returns to view older and less popular material. The solution to 'bad' material on the internet is to keep publishing new 'good' material about yourself until the old material is so far down the search response that in practice most people will never find it.
 
"Write good over bad. Respond to critical or negative comments with positive, constructive and authentic responses. This is an interactive media, and success now requires that we all develop the skills to create and shape our own and our company's brand perception in social networking dialogues. This is done by winning the respect of your audience - not by challenging your critics to battle in the courts."

What Mr Hodgkinson does not say of course, is that material posted on a highly trafficked social networking site is much more likely to get widely read and highly indexed on search engines than copy posted on a moderately trafficked company website. Thus, the maligned are more likely to meet with success if they work through the social networking site than their own.

Universal Music Group, its CEO Doug Morris, and parent company Vivendi would do well to take note. It would be fair to say that most grass roots music consumers had no feelings one way or the other about UMG because their paths simply didn't intersect.

As soon as UMG initiated a 1 billion lawsuit against one of the most popular Web 2.0 sites in the world YouTube and threatened to pull its music from Apple's popular music download site iTunes, UMG, Mr Morris and Vivendi suddenly turned into "that greedy record company" and there have even been calls for boycotts of its artists throughout the blogosphere.

The phenomenon of Web 2.0 has seen the public claim ownership of the sites they inhabit. Therefore, when it comes to a fight between traditional and Web 2.0 companies, in the eyes of the public there can only be one winner.