It's not social media, it's the web...
Forgive the dramatic headline, but I feel I've had a personal 'euraka moment'.
We're hurtling towards 2010, obsessed by social media, social networks, social software etc. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are now mainstays of everyday life - I can hardly book a hotel, go to the shops or buy a car without being invited to friend up or follow one business or the other. Many business are hiring online community managers, the US has it's first online President, even Gordon Brown has attempted to use 'the YouTube'. Like it or not 'social media' is mainstream. Except for one simple thing that I think we've all forgotten - it not social media, it's the web...What on earth does that mean? Well it's quite simple - I think we've all convinced ourselves we should see 'social media' as something novel, special, unusual even. We shouldn't. The fact is that social media is just one more strand of the web in 2009. It has different properties sure, but just like RSS, search, websites, email, IM, directories, forums etc it's part of the web - the sum total of which is the largest and most effective communication tool ever built. This may appear to be a rant against social media, but it really isn't. Social media is not a fad, and just like all of the other bits of the web listed above, it's not going to go away. I just want to make this point because in treating social media as kind of a holy grail we've mystified it, started to 'professionalize' it, and worst of all we frequently focus on it as a medium rather than the conversations it can enable. Why is this important? As I said, it's because the web is a communication tool and as online evangelists we should be focusing on helping organizations, businesses, politicians etc not to formulate 'social media strategies' but how to communicate using the web as a whole. And effective communication is a two way process - it requires thinking and listening as well as speaking. That's where we come back to good old fashioned communication planning; defining objectives, identifying audiences, selecting appropriate channels, delivering messages, listening and feeding back. The methods stay the same, only the channels will differ. This years hot tools are Twitter and Facebook, next years will be mobile augmented reality and location based social networks. That's what I'm going to make my focus from now on; helping clients to use the web - the whole web - to communicate more effectively with their customers, their employees and their suppliers.Any thoughts?
Comments [6]