Getting It

Hooking into connection culture the Weather Watch way

If you want to watch a company embrace all that is the next big communications thing - check out weatherwatch.co.nz.

I'd never even heard of them before I interviewed Richard Green on the radio show, but now it seems they're everywhere - including holding a permanent space on my desktop during the event they affectionately refer to as 'Snowmageddon'. 

By my reckoning, they've just about doubled their Facebook 'likes' in the past 24 hours, rocketing ahead from a respectable 2000 to something around 4000 at the time of writing. 

There's no doubt that Weatherwatch are on to a good thing. After all, weather is the one great universal topic. And since the fragmentation of mainstream media and the consequent death of shared experience (when was the last great 'who shot JR' telly moment?), it's a guaranteed people connector and community binder. Safe ground, no matter what the differences between folk. 

So it only stands to reason that, since we love to talk about weather in real life, we'll also love to use social media to extend the conversation - especially those true obsessives who have exhausted (or bored to tears) their immediate realm of real-life contacts, and are looking to connect to others just like them. 

Weatherwatch has managed to do something that the crusty old Met Service never could: it has hooked into the excitement, the thrill, the drama and passion of the weather, and put it out there for us all to share. They're a great example of an organisation using tools like Facebook to connect with, engage and hold an audience. 

But that's not all they do. They're tapped into another communications now secret: they speak plain English . It may not always be perfect, and one of them is seriously comma impaired (continually leaving out the , in sentences like 'that's right, Susi'), but we forgive them because they seem like really likeable guys. 

They've got something else that the competition can't match: personality and the freedom to express it. 

When was the last time you saw a regular-guy-or-gal metservice person who was just like you and I, without all of the 'I'm a Met Service Spokesperson, and Here Are My Official Words' business? Oh sure, some of them try. But between the unkempt beards and the pocket-protector fashion sense, it's hard to find much to relate to.

These guys, on the other hand, are warm and funny, spontaneous, and just plain real. They use smiley-face emoticons when people Facebook them, excited about the coming snow. They show empathy and interest. Importantly, they're OK about getting it wrong. They're willing to take risks, and they're not precious about it.

The Weatherwatch guys understand something else that's important about what works right now: they know how to start and sustain a conversation. Old school organisations continue to issue edicts/statements/information updates, and retreat back to their ivory towers. New communicators know that the real gold, the opportunity, is not in the information itself, but the interactions that follow - that gather momentum in snow-ball fashion as more and more people gather around the idea.

They also seem to intuitively understand something that so many organisations don't: that even though they're hard work and time consuming, the new consumer expects more than a single-time interaction. Truly successful companies today find ways to build and sustain relationships. 

 

 

What lies beneath the bright, shiny, happy headline

NZ's first state-of-the-nation for the media industry is out, thanks to a new report by PWC which takes a big picture look at the sector through until 2015.

 NBR's take on it (Media Forecast Bright) and  Stuff's summation look initially to be good news. However scratch the surface, and the picture is not pretty for mainstream media still overly reliant on traditional off-line channels. Unless they are to turn their current thinking on its head, and really get to grips with the stark, cold reality that it's content, not channel, that will drive their future. 

This idea - that people will gravitate towards the best writing, reading, imagery, regardless of the form it is housed in - is anathema to many mainstream media outlets, who have spent years centralising, systemising, de-localising, generalising and just plain dumbing down their content in the hubristic belief that people will continue to flock to them - just because they're of who they are.

The evolution of the 24 hour news environment has led to a quantity-over-quality ethos. The initial toe in the water to digital for many media organisations left a bad taste in their mouth, as efforts to monetise the early days of online content failed. 

However models like the itunes store shows that people will pay when relevant, quality content is organised, categorised, filtered and boosted (curated, in today's communications lexicon) - even if for a little more work they can get it free from somewhere else. 

That digital advertising revenues now surpass traditional media spend in this country should come as no surprise, but still, it is hard not to draw breath sharply at how quickly it has happened. 

More on this later. There's a lot left to be said.