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Letting the hot air out of social media

by Steven Hodson on November 26, 2008 · Comments

Social Media SpecialistFor almost the past week Hugh MacLeod has been posting some of his best cartoons drawn on the back of business cards that I think he has drawn for some time. They are all about poking fun at the idea of there being some sort of profession called social media specialists; and I have been looking forward to every new post of his hoping for some fresh cartoon harpooning this fake profession.

Now before you start lining up to take shots at me like some clip from the movie Airplane stop and think for a minute - what does being a specialist imply. Well for one it would seem to imply that some person has become a renowned expert in some field and because of that expertise they are consider to be a specialist. Much like we have heart surgeons, appeal lawyers or scientists studying quantum mechanics who could be considered to be specialists in their fields because of the number of years required to even claim to have any expertise in those areas.

Then we have this intangible concept called social media that has been around for less time than Britney has spent in rehab for crying out loud and yet we have people proclaiming to be experts in the field. What field? We still have people who have been at the forefront of this whole movement who can’t agree on a solid definition of what social media is; or what it is suppose to do. All we have had for the last three or four years (at the most) is nothing more than buzzwords being passed between a very small group of people.

Social media is just another bullshit term created in the wave of Web 2.0 for something we have been doing for a very long time - communicating; but then I guess calling oneself a social media specialist sounds newer and cooler than what existed before - communication specialists. Ask anyone who has been around long enough in the computer industry and they will tell you that while some of the methods are newer and snazzier they are no different that IRC, newsgroups, email lists, web forums or even instant messaging. It’s all communication - people talking with each other. All we have done is provided a bigger megaphone to yell at people with.

The sooner we get over this buzzword horniness and realize that all we are doing is adding new extensions to what we already have the sooner we will find these new tools taking deeper root. This was the excellent point made by SuzeMuse in a post yesterday where she said

Instead of trying to ram social media down people’s throats, let’s find ways incorporate it as an extension to what already exists.

For her it is a matter of reaching the regular joe’s instead of isolating ourselves within this bubble of non-existant newness

Instead of spending so much time yammering on with a bunch of people who are saying the same things back to us, maybe we should spend a little more time talking to the people who aren’t talking about this stuff (i.e. most people). Look at my contractor buddy. We took the time to explain to him what a blog post is all about in terms that make sense to him. He immediately saw the value in doing it - after all, he runs a business. He knows that people will see his post and that it will help him promote his business. For us, we get to expand the stories of the characters on our show and provide additional, valuable content to our viewers. Everybody wins. We’re not selling him social media…we’re providing him an opportunity to make a connection with his customers. And being a smart businessman, that’s something that he totally gets.

But instead we spend more time yipping about being involved in increasing numbers of conversations. It doesn’t matter where they are we just have  to be involved. We have to join every single new extensions of a previous service in order to make sure we are where we can be talked to and we can talk back. Just more yada yada yada - that’s all it ends up being.

The thing is what is this over riding compulsion to be in every new service that comes out. Are we really enlarging our conversations by constantly spreading ourselves so thin? This is something that Chris Brogan asked yesterday when he wrote

One reason is that I don’t like Plurk. I also don’t like Pownce, Jaiku, and several other platforms that people all like and think are perfectly serviceable. I hang out a bit on FriendFeed, but not as much as the allstars. I don’t hang out on SocialMedian, but that’s not too bad a service either.

I belong to several Facebook groups where I don’t really comment that often. I belong to a handful of Ning groups, too. Some Yahoogroups, some Google Groups.

Getting a feeling yet?

You and I are doing business in Twitter. You and I are doing things on XYZ platform. There are gazillions of other conversations that I’m not touching, that Seth isn’t touching, that Scoble or Kawasaki or whoever the heck you want to put in the *.person.who.should.join.the.conversation should be touching.

But is that really the goal? Or is the goal to fish where your fish are, to do what you plan to do, and to do it well?

There are days where I sit back looking at my monitors and watch Twirl do its thing and FriendFeed refreshing in Safari and I wonder what just what is all this doing for me. I like to think that I have developed a not bad network on both services but I’m still not sure what value they are giving that I am not already getting from reading some 300 to 400 constantly refreshing feeds or being involved in the comments on some great posts.

Social Media SpecialistThis isn’t even taking into account the WinExtra forums or IRC channel or any number of IM conversations I could have going. then there is my own blog and the conversations being started there. I realize that not everyone has a blog or reads vast numbers of blog feeds per day and for them maybe things like Twitter, FriendFeed and SocialMedian are great. however I don’t think that trying to slap a new shade of lipstick on an old pig should make us feel obligated to be in every conversation happening on the web.

Chances are as well that given the speed in which communication changes on the web that something else will come along that will just be a bunch of new extensions on what we are already using to communicate with each other. social media at that point will just blow away like the hot air that it is and we’ll all be calling ourselves specialists of something new in a year or two.

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Tagged as: blogging, FriendFeed, Hugh MacLeod, social media, Twitter

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  • mrhames
    I work in an ad agency where buzzwords get thrown around with such velocity that if words could hurt, there would be carnage. And after all the buzzwords stop, I try to tell that this isn't new. The tools are new, but this is still marketing.

    Now, at this point, i should tell you that I'm a former copywriter and current social media strategist. I got to pick my title, and that's what I picked. Because people are looking for people to talk in a normal way about all this shit, and copywriters do that for a living. So here I am. In my agency telling people to think about the brand's conversation as a whole (which used to be one way), and think about how it could be added to social media places where applicable.

    I once wrote a blog post saying I'm not a billboard marketer, since there aren't people who only do billboards. I would like Social media to not be a silo, but just be a tool. But when you say blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, some marketers heads explode. And that's messy.

    So for now, I play along. Until they catch up.
  • +20 points for the lipstick on a pig reference. Like I keep saying, the platform doesn't matter, it's about having ideas that spread. Ignore the platform, focus on good marketing - technology lets you do new things with it, sure, but it's still all about ideas that stick.

    If you do things right, they will spread into all areas of the web.
  • You make some very cogent points but allow me to give some pro and con points.

    I know social media is a ridiculous word (as if some "media" are hanging out at the street corner chatting about their lives over drinks). But, so was the word "Internet" (which, if some "big" minds of 640K memory fame were to be believed, was a fad) and the "web"? Come on, were we supposed to be spiders?

    But, those two serious innovations have changed the world, society and communications as we know them. Were there dime-a-dozen (make that a nickel now with lower prices and bad economy effects) "Internet Consultants" just because they had gotten an AOL email address and had a briefcase? Yes. Are there even more such "social media specialists"? Of course.

    Are the new social media capable of changing social communications, global communications and even whole industries (like mobile communications, news gathering and distribution, even online payments)? As another pig with lipstick, Sarah Palin, (surely owing part of her defeat to a social media flood of dislike for her) would say, "You betcha!"

    Imran Anwar
    "Live, Forever" http://neternity.org
    http://imran.com/media/blog/
  • I have to say that my thoughts were solidified by interviewing Alan Scott, CMO of the Dow Jones company. He doesn't spend a single dollar on social media. He spends money on marketing, and some of it has social media elements. Lightbulb.

    We're using the new tools, but they, in and of themselves, aren't the religion. Or rather, there's a religion that you don't have to buy into to use the tools. Or rather, we're going to derive the best potential point between what we have to do to get money/value/love/peanuts and HOW we do it.

    Or, hey, nice cartoons and a good point or four, Steven. : )
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