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Company’s that focus their Web strategy on building a better home page have missed the point of the social media revolution, Ogilvy Public Relations social media strategist Thomas Crampton said Nov. 6 at the Thunderbird Global Reunion in Macau.
“Google is your company’s home page,” he told an audience of about 125 Thunderbird School of Global Management alumni gathered at the StarWorld Hotel in Macau.
Crampton said companies need to pour available resources into developing a strong presence on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “There are conversations going on about you and your company, whether you are involved in them or not,” said Crampton, a blogger at www.thomascrampton.com who runs social media strategy for Oglivy in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously he spent 18 years as a foreign correspondent for newspapers such as the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
He said social media represents a communication invention as big as moveable type. “What we’re talking about here is a change that cannot be measured in years,” he said. “It cannot be measured in decades. The shift that we are undergoing is a change in the way humans communicate that can only be measured in terms of the largest shifts in communication over the last millennia.”
Crampton said blogs and other social media outlets have opened the power of the printing press to any person with a computer and Internet access. “The invention of moveable type changed the way humans communicate,” he said. “For the first time ever, one person could communicate with a million people in a single day.”
But moveable type had a major limitation. “To be that one person, you had to own a printing press,” Crampton said. “The fundamental shift happening now is that everybody in this room owns that printing press. Suddenly we have a world empowered.”
Crampton shared the example of Matt Harding, a computer programmer in Seattle, Washington, who lost his job when the dot-com bubble burst in the late 1990s. Harding started traveling the world, and everywhere he went he recorded himself dancing.
Harding posted the videos on YouTube and sent links to his friends, but he soon discovered that complete strangers were following his adventures. Stride gum and Visa eventually endorsed him, and today more than 31 million people have watched him dance in places such as Fiji, Spain and Zanzibar.
“The Internet and social media are the most powerful means of expressing emotion ever invented by humans,” Crampton said. “The Internet is about emotion.”
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