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The Huffington Post's Roy Sekoff explains how social media is helping the broadcaster achieve the authenticity so many others lack

By Patrick Baglee

September 24, 2013 | 6 min read

In an Advertising Week New York session titled 'Driving Social Change Through Social Media', Roy Sekoff, founding editor of The Huffington Post talks to Al Jazeera America anchor Ali Velshi about how his brand is there to "give a voice to the voiceless" and social media is the vehicle allowing the broadcaster to do it. Patrick Baglee reports.

In one of the day’s more unexpected pleasures, Ali Velshi of Al Jazeera America and Roy Sekoff, founding editor of The Huffington Post chatted about driving social change through social media. Well, they did, and they didn’t but in a very entertaining way. HuffPost Live started back in 2005. Since then it has welcomed around 10,000 guests from 90 countries. Their broadcasting, in Sekoff’s words, is there to "give a voice to the voiceless." HuffPost Live has built a very engaged community, and made a conscious decision to take the conversations being had by this community and put them and the people having them front and centre. Sekoff rejects the notion that only five people – whose names are in every producer’s address book – have the ability to come on and talk about whatever might be in the news. He continues: "there are very many people who have interesting viewpoints and express them very articulately." What they do for the HuffPost Live is add more authenticity to the conversation. The difference is that these people are not the experts of the sort that the mainstream channels "curate" and present as defining the view of a story, and that’s in part because The Huffington Post and in particular HuffPost Live have been redefining what an expert is. Sekoff continues: "Experts have been from the halls of academia or they have some experience in the government, and that’s the classic definition of an expert. Our definition of an expert is someone who has skin in the game." So in the case of Obamacare, HuffPost Live would talk to a mother whose son had a pre-existing condition who couldn’t get any coverage before and now she can, someone with an involvement deeper than dial-an-expert. Today, social media is HuffPost Live’s booking tool and the place where they find people with interesting views across the social channels that are driving the conversation. Speed is to their advantage too. Sekoff sees traditional media as a cruise ship, where things take time and adjustments are slow. "We’re still a speedboat," says Sekoff, who believes it’s not about telling someone they’re out of time and that it’s the end of a segment. "What we’re saying," he continues "is that this matters." Conversations are allowed to run, to whatever length, as long as they’re interesting. It’s disconcerting for those that have learned to speak in soundbites, particularly celebrities who come on and get through the three programmed things they are briefed to cover. And then they realize, 'Holy crap, I’ve got another 20 minutes to fill' and they start getting real, and it feels more authentic." Authenticity extends to the channel’s use of Skype and Google Chat for programming segments, where the quality is a bit ropey from time to time, and screens freeze, and it feels more authentic because it’s how people talk to people every day. "It feels real because the production value is a message in itself. It has the friction and the frisson of reality." Another tool used by HuffPost Live is The Resource Well. In it, users can find all the materials that have been used to create a segment, as can the participants. Supporting data, clips and articles all help to give context to a story or a segment and add to its richness. It also creates more of a level playing field for those involved, so that the conversation is less about discovery and more about enriched debate. It’s creates a more inclusive conversation. Discussing the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent manhunt, Sekoff described the mainstream media’s presentation of the ongoing situation as being like a giant "speculationatron" with coverage that was designed to make people jittery, wherever they were, repeating the same footage over and over again. As he directed the coverage that day, HuffPost Live tried to ‘cast sunlight’ into the situation, and talked about the new techniques of surveillance and chatted with civil libertarians about the extent to which our movements and conversations can be monitored. "We let other people give you the thing. We want to have the thing about the thing and the conversation that the news provokes," he says. As to what authenticity means for brands in media today, Sekoff has a couple of views, and a new idea for brands and advertisers. "With brands and social media and the speed of social media, you try to be part of it, which can be great if you do it right, or can feel horribly phony if you don’t." He recalls a video from McDonald’s in Toronto, made in response to a customer’s query about why a Big Mac when served didn’t look like it did in the photograph in the store. The film is the result of a brand choosing to be transparent and, whether as a result of this transparency, or the shock of this particular brand deciding to make it, the film has more than nine million hits on YouTube. Then Sekoff gets to his idea: "I think every brand should have an evangelist. If you really believe in your product you should be able to come out and to say 'This is what makes my brand different' and just talk from your heart. We haven’t done it yet, but I pitched to our CEO that I wanted to do segments with brands like Brand Thunderdome, where two brands walk in and one brand walks out." It might not be the dream programming that advertisers are looking for, but in Sekoff’s hands you have to figure it would be compelling viewing nonetheless.Throughout this week Patrick Baglee is reporting from Advertising Week New York. He most recently reported from a session with The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger, discussing a post-Snowden world.
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