In May 2005 Business Week ran a front cover that declared ‘Blogs will change your business‘, the June 15, 2009 edition of Twitter makes the even bolder claim ‘How Twitter will change the way we live‘.
As someone who started blogging at the start of 2003 the Business Week article was a tipping point. It was when I began to get approaches from global PR firms and their clients eager to learn about how social media would impact on their work. I first spoke at a social media conference in November 2005 (organised by Don’t Panic and Philip Young at the University of Sunderland).
I originally started blogging as a local councillor, and I’d love to be able to claim it was that as a public relations professional I’d had some great insight as to how social media would disrupt traditional media and communications channels. But it was nothing so profound, it was simply that I thought doing a blog would be a lot easier than maintaining my councillor website (which forced me to try and understand things like FTP and HTML). It was a lot easier, but more importantly I very quickly found that it was actually a lot better. Suddenly I was able to have conversations and maintain relationships with key stakeholders in my ward far better than I had before. It was only about a month later I realised it could also have enormous potential for me as a public relations professional.
When Business Week ran its ‘Blogs will change your business’ cover blogs were at the peak of inflated expectation on the Gartner hype cycle. As the work we’re doing at Wolfstar demonstrates we’ve now reached the slope of enlightenment. The Time front cover asking ‘How Twitter will change the way we live’ is another indication that micro-blogging or Twitter is at the peak of inflated expectation.
If you’d like to see some case studies demonstrating real social media success for businesses in the UK and globally then give me a call on +44 (0)845 838 7282.
