Forget social media, let’s talk community
December 15th, 2009
Is social media the new web 2.0, a term that’s absolutely meaningless?
In practice, social media is often a new form of interruptive marketing. The vast majority of companies are tweeting, linking in and facebooking just to broadcast messages, without regard to discussion or conversation. Most corporate messages in social media are the equivalent of truncated press releases.
Indulge in social media if you want, but if you really want to deliver value, establish a community for customers, partners and potential customers. Provide an outlet for technical information, peer-to-peer interaction, customer stories, surveys, Q&As, interviews, blogs from your product developers, commentary and other content people in your industry can’t get anywhere else.
You have a choice: Add to the cacophony or establish a welcomed outlet for constructive conversation.
About time and well said! I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who saw more smoke and no mirrors in this latest Lemming trek. The original social media, a telephone, had, and still has, the real advantage of being really on-line and interactive, not hiding behind an off-line electronic wall.
Chuck Brooks
FutureWare SCG
Thanks, Chuck. There are a lot of people talking out there and few listening. The companies that can use new media to conduct real conversations with customers are going to have a big competitive advantage.
Agree. I teach military public affairs and “social media” is the buzz word across the Department of Defense. Everybody wants some, but few know how to use it. We look to civilian businesses to pick up “best practices” to apply to military organizations. The practices we’ve picked up are the exact pitfalls you discuss. I’m currently conducting independent research to identify real “best practices” that work so we can teach then to our practitioners of social media.
Thanks for the input, Paul. A good source of information is “Inbound Marketing” by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, although it doesn’t talk too much about setting up community sites. A couple good community sites for IT folks are http://www.simple-talk.com and http://www.sqlservercentral.com. I also have several other posts on this blog that discuss the issue. Would be glad to discuss at any time.
Agree with you guys that everybody has interest in “knowing” social media but few people really wants to “participating”. Social media is evolving and so are the people in the marketing and pr. The major question worth of note is how we could find a way to better engage in the social media and create a “real” dialogue instead of sending messages out.