Feed fight! Feed fight!
In this corner -Brian “I don’t even own a fax machine” Solis, the author of “The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing.” Here’s his basic premise:
Monologue has given way to dialog.
Social media has created a new layer of influencers. It is the understanding of the role people play in the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how they in turn, share and also create content for others to participate. This, and only this, allows us to truly grasp the future of communications.
Read the complete manifesto here. If you haven’t read this, you must.
And in the other corner, Ryan Carson, author of Why I don’t use social software (click to read the entire post. It’s from about a year ago but it may be even more relevant today.)
I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either…
So one question that arises is this: If you are going to depend on social media for discovering new information but others like you in your demographic are not participating in social media, then how relevant is that new information to you? Recommendation software (Amazon, NetFlix, etc.) at least looks at your product behavior and matches it to others with similar behavior and then tells you what you’re missing.
How do you add an “others like me” filter across the board for social media? I’m not a software architect and maybe someone is working on this right now but it seems to me that that would require contributors to all sorts of sites to have some kind of demographic profile passport that they can use to identify themselves across a variety of applications. Privacy concerns would probably kill that idea if the cross application data storage challenges didn’t do it first (Who would you trust to centrally store your profile data plus what you recommend in your blog, your reviews on Amazon, on your MySpace page, what you add to Digg, del.icio.us, etc.? )
From where I sit, I find value in both of these points of view. I think social media is, and will continue to be, highly influential in marketing and PR. Ignore it at your own peril. And I also think that people are way too busy to participate in everything. The only near term resolution of this tension (social media is the new PR vs. everyone is too busy to use social media) is that marketers will have to very selectively apply social media technologies to their targeted demographic groups in a way that optimizes their participation. What incentives do people need to participate? What reward overcomes inertia?
My guess is that it will come down to testing what works for this particular good / service with these particular folks. What media tools can we give them that will enhance their likelihood of effectively spreading the word to their demographic peers? And, at this point in time, I think the honest answer is “Who knows? Let’s test and find out.”
We’ll be doing just that in July and I’ll report back later this summer on what we learned.
Gary Ward
Topics: Brian Solis, Marketing, Ryan Carson |
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