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Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter.
A lack of understanding and knowledge can often stand in the way of the successful implementation of social media, or even getting past the approval stage. In an interview for a recent research report, Joyce Lewis, marketing and communications manager for the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) school at the University of Southampton, suggests a lot more could be done if communicators better understood the web as a whole.
"One problem for professional communicators is that the web is still fairly new. It's only been around for about 10 years and it's only in the last five that communicators have been able to get their hands on websites that make an impact," says Lewis.
"It’s still fairly radical for communicators to think of the web as a completely different entity, rather than just another publishing medium – the fact that we still talk about 'Writing killer content for your website' shows that."
Envision the future
For Lewis, the problem is a lack of ability across the global population to envision a future for the internet outside the boundaries of what they already know. "I don’t think the world in general has got close to fully exploring what the web can do yet," she explains. "There's still so much we don't know."
Constrained by experience
In Lewis' opinion, we're constrained by our experiences and so simply put most computer technology to use as "modern" versions of old things – Microsoft Word as a new typewriter; Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia. "Thats why, until now, the web has just been used to store and share text. But there could be a wealth of things it could do, if we didn't see it so two-dimensionally. When you think about how much it has already developed, it could be that the web in 10 years time will be a totally different beast, doing totally different things."
The boom of online video
Lewis believes the whole conversation could be different, and the boom of online video that weve seen over the last couple of years is just one part of that. "Its quicker to view, it's more appealing, it's emotionally rich, and most people's bandwidth can now support it. So it's definitely one way the web is going."
Emotionally rich experience
"I don't think the web is a method for telling people things in the way you can with print," she says, "because there's just too much of it. With a magazine, the print entity sits alone in their hands: 'Read this, it's all there is'. But with the web, you're inviting people into a world where they're only one click away from leaving your site and entering a whole other world of interesting things. People's interactions with the web have to be short and direct, because otherwise they'll be gone. So you can't write long lectures on the web – but you can show and exemplify things and you can give them a much more emotionally rich experience."
Best regards,
Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com
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