Why I Hate Social Media
Because Media Itself Just Isn't That Interesting -- Not Even the Social Kind
People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It's a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the "social" kind.
Far from being interesting (unless you enjoy following mutually referencing bloggers who blog about blogging), social media is just an excuse. It is, to be specific, the old marketing industry's latest excuse to waste more money on bad ideas and lazy thinking.
So let's ignore it. Let's get really radical and stop trying to keep marketing 1.0 thinking alive with Web 2.0 media (because copycat content is no Band-Aid for broken brands and lackluster products and services, no matter how cost-effective or powerful the social web may be). Let's forget the social media "revolution" and recognize that ignoring social media would be the truly revolutionary thing to do.
I'm not saying that we should ignore the social web, or the cloud, or mobile connectedness altogether. I'm not arguing that brands should underestimate the transformative power of the technology at their disposal, or their ability to connect with people and provide targeted, relevant offerings in unprecedented ways. And I'm certainly not denying the brilliance of value-adding web-based services or inspiring and engaging web-enabled campaigns.
Amazon makes it easy for people to find things they want, based on recommendations they can believe in. Local bakeries tip off nearby followers about fresh bread and cookies via Twitter, while Tony Hawk used regular tweets to facilitate a global treasure hunt for his skateboards. Adobe uses Delicious to bookmark helpful sites for its customers, connecting its community and rewarding innovative partners. Urban Outfitters has turned its Flickr page into a giant, wearer-generated catalog and style guide. The U.K.'s Guardian, a relatively niche title in printed form, has turned itself into the world's pre-eminent online newspaper, because it understands that online news plays by different rules. Speight's Brewery invited millions of Kiwis to follow online as a pub it built on a container ship sailed from New Zealand to France. And brands like Starbucks and Doritos have openly collaborated with their loyalists to create new products.
So we should tip our hats to brands that are leveraging the social web in smart ways, but should also recognize that these exceptions merely prove the dismal rule of social media right now. Because for every Amazon or Adobe, brands with genuinely good ideas to share and good stories to tell, there's a Skittles (which had the brilliantly pointless idea of replacing its website with a Twitter feed), or a Pizza Hut (which openly advertised for summer interns who would be required to Tweet about the great time they were having). And for every Tony Hawk or Speight's, there's an Ashton claiming to be more relevant than CNN, or another Wal-Mart wannabe (including a recent top advertising-award winner) driven by the impatience of their marketing 1.0-obsessed agency masters to create fake entries, videos, content and comments to support their "authentic" social campaigns.
The question for us all right now (and I include my own agency) is: What would happen if we acted on the implications of social media, rather than just use it as cheap media? What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in -- a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad? What if we stopped getting all hot and heavy over the latest new media success stories du jour, and starting realizing that the real triumph of, say, the Obama campaign was the product and the story, not the channel used for storytelling? What if we took the social media "revolution" as our cue to stop creating tactical campaigns focused on amplifying our same-same stories and start creating better stuff and better stories to tell? What if we got really bold, and focused on creating products and services so inspired that "social" media does all our storytelling for us?
Remember, this remains a predominantly analog world. Most people are still looking for real things: experiences, connections, value, stories, emotions. And this remains a world in which most brands are failing to make the most of the existing channels available to them, where basic and very real issues are left unaddressed, like customer-experience delivery, retail-partner engagement, consistent and authentic brand storytelling and better product and service development. Sure, not all of these will make a 29-year-old marketing manager an industry rock star as fast as a spending money on cool new social media app, gadget, widget or viral campaign, but it matters a whole lot more.
The truth is that the digital possibilities out there are endless (and endlessly fascinating), but smart brands and smart marketers recognize that their potential is to facilitate and amplify, not to replace the real stuff that matters. No media or channel can ever be the solution. Not even social media.
Now there's a point of view on social media that's worth sharing with clients. Understand it, internalize the implications of it and figure out what you can do better because of it. Use it as yet another prompt to change everything you do. Use it as the final spur to becoming a customer-centric, holistic, experience brand. Then forget about it and start doing something real.
~~~
Matt Jones is director of strategy and planning for Jack Morton Worldwide in New York. In April he moved to New York from Sydney, Australia, where his clients included Ford, Microsoft and Sony.
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Kevin Sonoff
Digital Marketing Buzz
http://www.digitalmarketingbuzz.com
And if you think about it that way, "social marketing" is what in the old days we called "affinity marketing" and that is way cool.
Social or affinity marketing is about tapping into a shared passion or interest within a trusted avenue and using that dynamic to drive business. It is about leveraging the most real thing about us as humans – our social natures.
I dunno -- it does not get more fun than that and that's what I love social media.
Social media outlets and tools are all about the Conversation and building relationships with other people.
In conversation marketing the idea is to:
But what does a company need to do to "Interact" in the "Conversation"?
* Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize their feedback to improve your business.
* Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, non-marketing-speak content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
* Build relationships with market conversation influencers, participants and listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
* Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, even if it isn't what you hope to hear.
* Don't be afraid to share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
- Call it what it is, Word-of-Mouth (WOM) - the original form of advertising, now exponentially more powerful thanks to technology. A customer with an internet-empowered voice is sometimes a threat but more often an opportunity.
- Listen hard and often – a well structured online WOM research program can provide pure insight to customer sentiment on a very detailed level. This is a wonderful source of unsolicited feedback but also a window into the current influence of WOM on your business. It's invaluable insight that can guide a company into the WOM landscape with a bit of wisdom.
- Always place service over solicitation – too often companies see "social media" as a new way to target customers. That's the fastest route to failure, rejection and costly brand damage. Corporate participation in WOM must provide value to the communities that have embraced their brand. Only by providing value can a company achieve acceptance, credibility and ultimately authority in these communities. And when done well, the company will be welcomed openly.
- Confidence is cheaper than persuasion – when companies place a greater emphasis on building confidence in their products and services and less on persuasion, they find success with less money.
- You can measure ROI – through the use of site analytics, adserving, conversion tracking, sentiment and other brand metrics you can measure ROI in terms of dollar-invested:dollars-returned, as well as cost-per-point of change in brand metrics.
Matt Cronin
Web Liquid
http://www.webliquidgroup.com
Mark Ruvelson
Light Speed Managment
http://www.lsm-la.com
http://www.twitter.com/LightSpeedMgmt
That's all social media is. It's an expansion of the conversational universe. It's not a thing by itself. There are applications of social media, like Twitter and Facebook, but they are not social media, just as the New York Times is not the news, but a way of communicating the news.
You can use Twitter and Facebook, but if you have nothing to say you wasted your time and money. And if you have something to say, make sure you say it to the right audience. Refusing to use social media is ok. It's like having a product and saying you won't advertise on radio. That may be a smart move. Or not.
I sense that your argument is more semantic than serious, but when I hear people in advertising say that social media is merely a channel and nothing more, I always think they sound scared. And they have good reason to be: the know that old media isn't working for them anymore, and that most of what they know about advertising is now completely irrelevant. That's a painful message to get, no matter what the medium.
www.stevenstark.net
www.twitter.com/stevenstark
Your headline drew me in, but I disagree with your premise... that social media = media.
Social media (mostly Facebook) keeps me in touch with clients, my family, related organizations and does so in a personable, engaging and often entertaining manner. I would definitely not consider any of these people "media".
Of course, taken to its extreme social media is no more effective than wearing a sandwich board or playing a guitar while in underwear. It's part of a larger marketing plan.
I think that advertisers are scared. The do not want to loose their excuse to charge $500,000 for a creative or tv spot. This can and will change the ways of the past that made everyone, but the consumers, millions and millions of dollars. "Boohoo, I have to actually pay attention to my market?" Get over it. It is brilliant and it will be criticized until some brilliant company or agency figures out how to bring the "mula" in...
I do not understand how the new wave in selling is all about building real relationships, but no one sees that social media is all about the same. Gitomer can make millions by simply writing in websites, newspaper columns, and books, but no one else can? People want to be part of something and these sites allows them to...
And one cannot forget that all of the Iranian news are coming out of these sites!!! How can one not consider them incredibly important!?!
This article should have never been printed... I am sorry. It feels like 'this message was brought you by: traditional media outlets loosing money.'
Good stuff - I look forward to reading your future musings.
Best,
Gunther Sonnenfeld
http://thinkstate.com
http://www.welcometonow.blogspot.com
http://www.twitter.com/goonth
Lesson learned: if the medium is relevant to the user (in Twitter's case, the media and the marketing communities), then it becomes the object of fascination. But if it has nothing to offer other target audiences, it isn't going to reach them. Most of my non-media/non-marketing friends have no interest in Twitter. Trying to keep up with the stream of messages doesn't work with their busy lives. If they want to connect with friends, there are easier ways for them to do so. If they want the latest news, they go specifically to news sites (either online or on TV).
In the end, it's the message and the dialogue, not the delivery system.
http://twitter.com/slainson
If I were running a brand looking for new ideas and had to choose between the author of this piece and Wojtek at Crispin, Porter +B, no question who I'd choose.
media not that interesting? It is probably a bigger contributor to collective culture that the bible!
Do not get me wrong, I am aware that these are social issues that are blamed on all of these outlets, but the possible threats are real. Conditioning is real, persuasion is real, etcetera.
The next time someone blames the media for social issues, I will forward them to this link and see what they think.
Those of us who are marketing and branding strategists to the core, and who also love social media, want to make sure clients understand that while social media may be hot, it doesn't replace marketing. It's just a tool of marketing. And it should be used wisely and with proper oversight, not randomly and at will. It's a similar battle that Creative Directors have faced for decades when trying to explain that advertising design should not be simply for design's sake, but should have a clear objective and strategy.
A lot of the agencies and marketers that are saying social media is "just media" or is "just a tool" aren't afraid of the industry's future, they're concerned about their client's brand future. And want to make sure clients (and amateur marketers) don't get swept up by the bright lights and ignore the basics.
In lieu of a trackback, here's a recent post of mine that further clarifies why social media is just a tool and how it can be leveraged responsibly: http://tr.im/smknife
I suppose a backlash was inevitable.
Two things. First, social media isn't media, and thinking of it that way just invites confusion (see http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=136016 ).
Second, maligning social applications based on those that failed makes about as much sense as criticizing TV advertising based a bad TV ad campaign.
Marketers who start with social applications as part of a clear strategy with a real objective can have impressive successes. We have hundreds of examples (and you cited a few good ones yourself). In fact, there is a book full of them: Groundswell.
By all means, keep ignoring social media. There are plenty of good agencies who will happy to take the business you turn away.
I agree with you and feel it is so symptomatic of the problems in the marketing world. A few companies/brands get it right, and then everyone else jumps in and most get it completely wrong. It was no different with web-sites and banner ads, or for that matter television.
Everyone wants to be part of what's new, even if there brand doesn't belong there, or they don't know how to execute it.
The truth is...it's all social now.
WW
The key is not to get hung up on the terminology but to look at what you want to achieve and which stakeholders in your organisation - customers, employees, suppliers, partners, investors and advocates - and from here look at what tools and resources you need to achieve these goals. Once people get over the "newness" of social tools, they will realise that it is just another piece of technology to support the movement of information between one or two individuals, small groups or manay to many conversations - something which has been going on in many departments around an organisation for a number of years - marketing is the latest team to have access to these tools and have got very excited as they see them as easy to use, low cost and a great tag line for the CV.
However, it will be the companies who learn how to leverage the tools along with content to educate, entertain, engage..... that will benefit in the long run.
Dont get caught up in the hype, stand back and look at what it enables you to do and if and how it can help you achieve your goals - if you can see a path go for it - if not then dont use it.
Social media is simply another tool that needs to be evaluated based on sales performance.
I look at the total cost of the campaign, including the cost of ad production, management and placement. I then compare this to the cost of social media campaign management.
For B2B products with a sales point of $80K per deal, advertisements cost approximately $2 per qualified viewer (not lead). For social media programs, the cost is $0.50
I'm looking for feedback.
Craig Oda
Page One PR
http://socialmediasurfer.com
media is a plural noun, the singular form is MEDIUM.
It upsets me to see people from the media industry doing this kind of mistakes.
Social Media is Personalized Media, isn't it?
What's a planner to do? In my view, you have to tell the King that he has no clothes (or pull the wizard's curtain back, or whatever other appropriate analogy you'd like to insert here) because we have a professional obligation to manage expectations both internally and externally.
So - just because a client wants a DM campaign, if it is the wrong thing, we should reject it - as we should reject random uses of new technologically based tools unless they are going to advance the critical business needs of our clients.
Tom Garrett
VP Client Services
McMurry, Inc.
follow me on twitter @desertmansarde ;-)
The fact is social media is hot now and it is something we can not ignore. I do however agree that the emphasis should not be put on social media itself as it is just a tool. So, sort out how to use it, adopt it and move on. There's nothing worse than all the so called marketers going on about how great SM is and they have never done any real marketing. Like the guy on Twitter that all he talks about is "check out these great tools for Twitter." or "This is how to use Twitter to become a rock star." Come on get some real content in there.
The internet is continuously evolving and SM is just one step along the way. The real story is how we got to this point. It used to be that mainstream marketing held all the cards because it was financially/technologically difficult to produce content. Now, with the introduction of the internet, blogs, software developments, inexpensive computers, smart phones, high speed internet, etc.. virtually anyone can publish text, videos and audio. This is what is really driving the explosion in SM!
There was a report done by Gartner last fall that stated, "More than 50 Percent of Fortune 1000 Companies Will Fail With Social Media." http://tr.im/iJSg The problem is that most companies have no idea how to deal with SM and therefore fail. There are 4 points that need to be considered when jumping into the fray:
1. Define your goals for using social media.
2. Get everyone on the same page.
3. Take your ego out of the equation.
4. Define how to measure success.
Bottom line social media can be a great "tool", but like anything else you need a plan!
Bryan Coe
Blackbird e-Solutions
http://blackbirdesolutions.com/
It just isn't so. And nothing has changed regarding the best way to learn about your customers. Sure, you can pay a vendor to consolidate the cacophony of a hundred thousand voiced into one nifty pie chart... or you can get off your duff and sit face to face with your customer – the old fashioned way – and really listen to their needs. And not just listen, mind you... actually do something about it to show that you heard them.
In the end, it's the fickle nature of the American consumer is what drives our daily search for new answers, better products, more complete services, etc. We want to provide out customers what they want. But don't be fooled by what they say to each other in blogs and posts. Sure, anybody will put on a great show if they think they have an audience – and if they have the time to script it out and rehearse. But don't ever forget we only say what we really think when it's one-on-one, and off the cuff.
So stop looking at your pie charts and have some real conversations with your customers...
But that's far from the case. I'll be the first to agree that agencies and companies are a little too quick to bet their budgets on anything that has a 2.0 at the end of it's name, and they need to remember that traditional efforts aren't yet ready to be shipped off to a museum. But to view social media as just another marketing tool to be considered alongside of TV, radio, roadside billboards and printed cocktail napkins is not only naive, but it shows a lack of understanding of its true nature.
Social media (complain about the name all you want - its functionality remains the same) is a far more personal experience than any other media can provide. It's the forging of real relationships - even just considering it an elaborate form of word-of-mouth (as one commenter did) is severely underestimating it's power and potential. According to this article by Retailer Daily ( http://bit.ly/17b7MZ ), 14% of social networkers want to interact with their favorite brands online. They don't just want to visit the store, read the Web site or glance over a print ad - they want to engage.
This isn't just one way communication, and it's not just viral pass-along. Social media is me writing a blog post that I'm a big fan of the new GM spot "Reinvented," and getting an e-mail from GM within hours thanking me for my support. It's a consumer tweeting about their experience with a certain brand, and that brand going out of their way to establish a direct relationship with that consumer and engage him or her in active conversation. Viral pass-along is part of it, communication of message is part of it, but relationship-building is at its very heart. Sorry, but no other media can deliver that.
Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, 'Perspectives on Marketing' and 'Perspectives on Branding'
http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky
http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com
One of the first places I look for brand/marketing opportunities is internally - at the product/offering. It used to take a while for people to discover that the promise being offered up in advertising was a lie. But with social media, the truth is revealed and quickly.
Social media requires companies to provide good products and customer service...http://tinyurl.com/lpzhwp
Christy Hiler
Cornett IMS
www.cornett-ims.com
Shailesh Ghimire
Director of Interactive Marketing
www.airmarketing.com/blog
"[MyBarackObama.com's] goal was to convene their supporters not control their supporters."
Cheers,
Adam Wright
http://www.adamfwright.com/blog/
The web is rich with opportunity. It allows the user to experience communications in more ways than any medium that has come before it. The "prize" will go to those who learn to harness the FULL capabilities of web for a rich user experience while maintaining the content quality the more traditional channels are known for.
Mark Stout
http//markstoutphotography.com
New mediums, media, applications, etc. are being created faster than the people who are intended to use them can addapt. Creating "new" technologies is easier than making then useful.
http://www.proudtoliveinamerica.com
Then came that new fangled Television that was going to keep people indoors and in the sitting room.
Truth is social media is just a sound bite the reason behind it is as old as the cave, we all have a basic need to be connected with our fellow beings. And now we can find people who share our passions and interests without all that annoying small talk.
As usual business is trying to leverage off the next wave of opportunity, do not adjust your set.
Thank you so much for articulating this point so well.
There are some good points but you miss the main one: Whatever is worth talking about, will be talked about. Call it WOM, call it social media, call it whatever you want. The technology + the people using it = the reason to get excited
We should not overhype it and we should not focus on the channel. But we should not try to make the channel seem meaningless because that just sounds ignorant.
To say that media is not interesting, and rather that people and ideas are interesting, is a classic (I think) syndrome of the advertising agency world. What agencies tend to forget is that each medium (whether tradional or otherwise) IS its own brand. And along with that come the same elements any of your brands shoot for: experience, interest, interaction, evangelism, etc. People pledge allegiance to a brand the same way they do to their favorite dial position or evening news program. It always cracks me up when an agency placed a buy based strictly on a CPP for a certain demographic, with no regard to format, lifestyle, interests, etc. That's where media gets interesting, and knowing how to capitalize on that information is the difference between a receptive listener and a tune-out.
That all being said, I do emphatically agree with you that social media is not a marketing solution, but rather a megaphone for an already well-planned and well-executed strategy. I also agree that the social media sphere will indeed force brands to be better, because if they're not, everyone and their mother will know about it.
www.diffusionblog.blogspot.com
stephenbyrne@diffusion.com.au
Working at an agency is probably frustrating. You have to come up with campaign ideas for lame brands. And the lame people at the lame brand make you use 'Social Media' (whatever that is) because they want to be 'viral', and hip. And forcing that is the ultimate lameness. That has to suck.
Social Media are just tools for communication. The transparency they afford is unprecedented. It's hard to measure ROI from this approach and it's hard to control it. But you can't deny the underlying value of one-many channels controlled by the consumer.
Check out my lame blog where I dissect attention-related topics and media stuff. http://www.permissiontechnology.com
Dave
I think Web 2.0's power lies in it's searchability - being able to search for PEOPLE. It's not only a tool for companies to hope to start a conversation. Or better yet, the hope to have just another bull horn in their already heavy "push marketing" tool bag.
You had said that the media is the conduit. I agree - it is the distribution channel. Kind of like the bus into the city - whatever city that may be. And there are lots of ways we can get there, maybe the train of even a taxi. Each has their own pros and cons, like social media.
For me, it's about marketing, audience and value, and without any of them, social media just will not work. But for now, I don't hate it.
Vickie Smith-Siculiano, PMP
http://www.tinyurl.com/vickpmp
http://www.twitter.com/VickiePMP
Social media is a tool, use it for what it can do and be a part of it for yourself and your business. Help others and have fun.
Matt gives good examples of brands using the social web and if you look closely you'll notice that brands like Speight's Brewery, Tony Hawk and Urban Outfitters, invited people to *join* in the campaign. It is not good enough these days to push messages at people online, let them pull from the brands they want be involved with.
Embracing the Social Web requires experiential brand awareness and reputation management. Everyone is a celebrity online these days [e.g Facebook vanity URLs] so what people are saying and sharing about the brand online is extremely important. Once anyone opens up a browser window they are participating in the social web and they can both embrace a brand that reaches out to them or they can create havoc.
Look how eMusic badly damaged its brand for instance, by not responding to what it's customers were upset about:
http://www.social-cache.com/2009/06/ten-years-later-emusiccom-crushes-it-brand-values-in-one-day-the-perils-of-not-having-a-community-manager
Dave Allen, Nemo, Portland
The tools don't make the craftsman. Sure, you can get by with hammer most of the time but a talented craftsman can use all the tools, and adeptly at that. Social media (or more accurately, the social web) is just one more tool to communicate, and a great one at that. Ignoring social media's capabilities may not kill your agency but it will definitely send a whole lot of business to an agency that does get it. And most of us like more business, no?
Thanks for provoking so much commentary Matt. I dig it.
A link to an article I wrote titled "Why social media doesn't matter. Unless you ignore it": http://www.owstudios.com/oteam/?p=1365
You started off with a sensationalist title saying you hate what's popular even going so far as to be risking "being shown the door." But then you goes on to tout all the benefits of the media citing all the great examples of how it's used. You say you hate the media, but you have quicklinks to facebook, digg, twitter, etc... right at the top of your blog post. B-L-O-G post. You can't content you hate blogs on a blog anymore then you say you hate facebook on facebook. You can't say you hate syndicated content and then try to get your content syndicated. If you really hate it that much I would have gotten this article in a magazine, not an online post. Sensationalist titling is something spammers use to get people to open their emails. Do we get a free iPod touch with this article?
That being said, I agree with a lot of what you said. There are way to many organizations out there who believe that just by having a facebook account they're facebooking and just by tweeting their same old marketing ads their utilizing twitter. It's just not so any more then spammers use email. There's a great blog post on the 5 steps to using new media to market the right way. I think you'll find that you and the author would agree on a lot of things: http://dewpoint.seraphimllc.com/2009/06/the-right-way-to-market-new-media/
P.S. See what I did there? I started off saying how much I hated your article and then by the end of my comment the story had arched and it turned out that I agree with a lot of what you said. We all love a happy ending but we're hooked by the sensational. It's very marketing 1.0 spammer style. I feel dirty.
Markets are conversations -- STILL. They're not channels. It's about participation, not broadcasting. The end.
I have to agree with mbalogh above, my logic sensors are tangled up and I feel a bit itchy after trying to follow this article's progression..
However, I do agree with the heart of social media lying in furthering our opportunities to connect with so many new people everywhere that we could not access just a few years ago. We should always taking steps ahead and not getting lost in cheap applications of great technologies.
-Jenn
Just the other day, it was announced that "three-quarters of hiring managers use LinkedIn to research credentials of job candidates" (http://www.cheezhead.com/2009/06/16/jc-hiring-managers-prefer-linked-in/). In our unforgiving economy, recent graduates and young professionals need to do as much as they can to get their names out there and network with others. This includes embracing social media outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and OneCubicle.
@jmacofearth
http://uber.la
What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in -- a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad?
"Social media isn't about social media."
What you're hating there isn't social media, it's all the social media that goes around IN social media. Blogging about blogging, etc .
Remove that, and all you have left is the media, and the social. Which were the better parts to begin with.
~ Wogan
What a strange statement...I wonder what your definition of media could be. Are you saying that radio, television, film, magazines, and newspapers are not that interesting? But brands are?
Sometimes I think you ad agency types live on your own planet...
http://twitter.com/NickLeck
http://whatdrivesonline.blogspot.com
No matter what spin people try to put on it, it's not revolutionary to resist social change. Leveraging the devices that support the social change for truly innovative purposes: THAT'S revolutionary.
There's so many holes to pick in your article its difficult to know where to start.
"People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It's a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the "social" kind."
There's a well known media theorist called Marshall McLuhan. Heard of him? He said "the medium is the message". It's not just the content of media that's important. The way the content is transmitted itself significantly impacts how our world works. If you don't get the medium, you are going to make the wrong suggestions to your clients.
"the real triumph of, say, the Obama campaign was the product and the story, not the channel used for storytelling?"
Product and story is even more important now, because of social media. Without the internet, Google search, email (yes all thse are examples of earlier social media), YouTube, blogs, Flickr and Twitter, Obama would have struggled to build he kind of engaged following he did. This medium is so personal so direct that authenticity is now paramount.
If you have a knock-out product, you don't even need a 'campaign' (or a story for that matter).
Get this. All media is social. From the printing press, to the telephone, all the way to Twitter. But the process of becoming social have dramatically accelerated with the convergence of the telco and computer industry. Social media is not a trend, but a fundamental human urge to communicate. And now we have the media do do so.
"The question for us all right now (and I include my own agency) is: What would happen if we acted on the implications of social media, rather than just use it as cheap media? What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in -- a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad?"
Sorry, try again. That para says absolutely nothing.
"Remember, this remains a predominantly analog world. Most people are still looking for real things: experiences, connections, value, stories, emotions. And this remains a world in which most brands are failing to make the most of the existing channels available to them, where basic and very real issues are left unaddressed, like customer-experience delivery, retail-partner engagement, consistent and authentic brand storytelling and better product and service development."
Agree, which is why social media is so exciting. Because it makes experiences, connections and even customer service so much more immediate. No idea what 'analogue' has got to do with it.
A bad article.
(because social ties are inherently interesting--and media platforms that support new kinds of social ties are changing everything)
However, it seems that by taking the approach of voicing an opinion that's less than synergistic with the popular opinion of a subject that has so much attention, translates to a creative way to gain readership. That's revolutionary.
http://vamblog.com
http://twitter.com/derektampa
Rick Middleton
www.rickmcopy.com
The article you cite in AgAge references SM's use as cheap media, but its novel value is the hyper-connection / user-generation it affords allowing for improved customer service alongside useful market research.