Everything is social media.
by asi
Oh the pain…. I can write a 5000 words article on the problem with social media specialists, experts and wearisome chatter but that would just add to the bla bla so i’ll try to keep it short.
When you stop thinking in terms of marketing fads and buzz words, you realise that every media is social media. Two years ago it was sensible to think in terms of social or participative media vs. traditional broadcast media. But that dichotomy doesn’t work anymore.
Without falling to some semantic traps (are we talking about technologies, behaviours, content or properties?) when people have the ability to share and converse in real time, beyond the physical world, everything becomes social. Every object can potentialy become social object and a point of conversation. The gravity of conversational tools simply suck in everything worth talking about. Everything.
Think about the most a-social media: 48s billboard. Nothing social right? wrong. If i can take a picture of that billboard and tweet, blog, twitpic it and make it a point for conversation this billboard became a social object and hence social media.
NYtimes is the second most linked-to website by bloggers (thanks Neil) and every article today is potentially distributed content which we can share, spread, comment on, synthesize and what not.
The Wire is probably the most tweeted TV show to date. Furthermore, just tune into Twitter when something interesting is going on in the news and see how news become social – remember the Obama inauguration?
Right, i promised to keep it short. Goodbye marketing fads, hello reality.
All together now – every media is social media.
Amen. I get hacked off with the stalinist tendency within digital which sees their way as they only way. It’s as bad a big TV agencies back in the 80s.
But as you say, everything has it’s place, everything can engage, everything can communicate and everything can be talked about.
It’s the idea not the channel that matters.
I agree – it’s about ‘Social thinking’ rather than ‘social media’. Social crosses all boundaries from PR to media to creative to technology. It’s therefore impossible to pigeon hole it, so the key becomes being able to break out strategy into constituent parts and then understand where it could be appropriate to socialise this strategy – whether that be on TV / outdoor / etc, in customer relations, product development and so on.
Jaffe juice is also thinking about this here: http://www.jaffejuice.com/2009/03/why-charging-a-digital-or-pr-agency-with-social-media-is-a-flawed-strategy.html
thanks jon and nick for popping by!
yup – absolutely right – the natural selection of interesting is channel agnostic.
i personally think that digital stalinists are right in many cases today because they are culturally digital and the most ‘social’ savvy. we’ve been living the values of ‘social’ for quite a while now and finally people are starting to get it.
of all suppliers in the market, digital agencies (at least the good ones) are most suitable to have a say at every stage of the strategic development. thing are changing quickly and both advertising and PR agencies will learn to think more social, and then the one with the best idea will win.
Agree about the horrible term, ‘social media’.
That said, even if you just TALKED about that 48s billboard to someone, it’s social. Never mind blogging it.
I wrote about this a few months ago: http://wannabeadman.blogspot.com/2008/12/semantics-recession-and-merging.html
(A bit more of a rambling post mind..
).
all media is social indeed my brother
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/04/be-nice-or-leave-slight-refrain.html
Agree. You don’t even need access to the internet to do social media marketing:
http://danielgoodall.com/2009/02/18/how-to-do-social-media-marketing-without-access-to-the-internet/
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Social Media should be a conversational not a one way propagating ads, thoughts, products and other stuff.. and yes anything and everything when inputted with the database of social media platform and became a public/community interest, and they talked about it..it became a social media..which creates a social thinking and to social conversation.