Contrarian voices
January 18th, 2007 by Mike O'TooleThis from Ryan Carson, as quoted in Nicholas Carr’s (talk about contrarian voices) blog:
“I’m a fairly typical Web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. you’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest stories, costomize 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.”
Thank you, Ryan Carson for airing our dirty little secret.
It is easy enough to believe, in the warm cocoon of the marketing profession, that the world has been upended. That people have reorganized their lives around Web 2.0. But it isn’t true for us as consumers, nor is it true for our BtoB clients. For most of the world (think of the consumers of our clients’ products and services), Flickr, Frapper, and Folksonomies exist–barely–as words they feel guilty for not knowing more about.
I don’t want to overstate the point. The fundamental promises of Web 2.0–the internet-enabled conversation, the democratization of culture and media (Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons Chair Lawrence Lessig calls it the advent of read/write culture, which I love)–are real. And my agency is committed to delivering marketing innovation to brands that are defined by innovation, so I have no interest in standing on the sidelines.
The principle is to be where your audience is, and most of them are right with Ryan Carson. Which is to say, paying attention to these trends, sampling some of the tools and channels, even committing to a few of the most useful. LinkedIn (as Ryan notes) is a great example of a social media tool that has tipped from cool to core. It was an early (launched in 2003) Web 2.0 mover, and has had the time to build trust and scale. I for one ignored LinkedIn invitations for years, skeptical (like Grouch Marx) of any club that would have someone like me as a member. Today, there are over 8 million LinkedIn members, more than enough nodes to make it a useful network for any business person.
Bottom line? Social media channels should be seen as an important extension to an integrated communications strategy, not as a replacement for that strategy.