I have written with scepticism about the social media phenomenon.  I predicted that my attitude would improve.  I am wiser, having spent many hours gathering information, sifting and sorting, and weighing weighty dilemma.  I wanted to know why marketers and PR folks should care about social media and I wanted to know how we should express our concern.

I’ve done the work.  You reap the benefit.  In this post, I address the Why and I use a couple of fresh late-2008 statistics.

• 40% of 18-55 year old connected consumers spend more than 4 hours a week on “social media” sites (Razorfish).
• 77% of 16-18 year old students have a social networking profile (U Minn).

If you are not using social media, you may not be hearing from a good-sized chunk of your market.

If you are not using social media, you are not speaking to that chunk of your market.

And it will get worse.

That chunk is growing fast.

Later,
–B–

What of the social media technologies and networks and wikis and widgets and wombats and so wan?  What are PR folk (and straight-up marketers, for that matter) to do with this thing called social media?

By way of an answer, I have another confused nod to McLuhan (see prior confusion) that I think nuggifies things nicely:

The Membership Is the Medium.

Let me deconstruct:  Social = community, and medium = conveyance.  Ergo and truly, when the community conveys the message = the membership is the medium.

You already knew it.  You know about viral marketing.  (I might argue that there is no such thing as viral marketing, not as an act of will, anyways, but I wouldn’t argue it in this tavern.)  Word-of-mouth is a better name for it because it removes me, the talking head who is not to be trusted, from the scenario and that brings me to the sub-text for this post: “Hey, PR!  Get out of the way!”  Words travel on the tongues of people who care enough (well or badly) to talk about whatever it is that is keeping you up tonight.   They’re doing the talking.  Listen and try to be helpful but for Marshall’s sake, stay out of the way.

What are PR folk to do with social media?  My prescription follows.

The community is your audience.  The members of the audience (none of whom are paying much attention to the hired messenger, by the way) carries, delivers, receives and repeats the morphing amorphous message through a million conversations.  When we say we must know our audience I say we must first listen if we are to know.  Listen (PR Job No.1), add the juice (the creative), and then find a way to drip feed the conversation play it back (PR Job No.2).

Why the drip feed?  Because nobody really wants to hear from the talking head.  (Speak into the microphone, man.)  The audience is deep into their own conversation and has neither the time nor an interest in a lecture, so show some respect.  The fact is, they’re doing your job.  They’re talking about your clients.  Get out of their way.  Do not wave your hands.  Do not jump up and down.  Instead, do the new job of supporting the conversation: put the facts, stories, angles, beauties and sorrows within reach.  If it is trustworthy and genuine there will be uptake.  And if it is a spitball and a fraud, there will also be uptake, but you won’t like the spew-back.

I watched and learned that the membership is the medium when I had the good fortune to contribute to the growth of a property called TravelPod.  That property is now the property of Expedia but back then, it was the spawn of Ottawa-based social networking pioneer Luc Levesque and here’s what happened.   Luc built a social networking platform to first support his own wandering communications needs, opened it up to others and, in time, became noticed by one, then another and then another assignment editor.  TravelPod got some nice coverage on its own merits and every instance generated a surge in membership registrations.  You can appreciate that a committed (as demonstrated by the fact of registration) travel-oriented social networking community would represent a coveted audience for advertisers, and that was the business model.  I became involved to help bump things up a notch; to induce some more of those registration surges, grow the membership/audience and enrich the property further.  A few press releases had some impact, but the story wasn’t changing, really, and I wasn’t getting it done.

Then, during one of those long drawn-out business conversations, an obvious fact became a crystallized concept.  The kinds of folks who blog do it for readers.  Their rewards are the comments; their best reward a mirror, or better, many mirrors: mirrors they will hold up to friends and family and strangers on the bus.  I think we always knew these things—always knew our audience—but we had not been doing the right things to serve and support what the audience wanted to do.  We made some changes.

Here’s a good example.  I had been producing the monthly newsletter and I was trying to write such compelling travel material (from my basement office, of course) that the members would immediately Send To A Friend and every friend in their contacts folder.  It was around that time that I began to understand that I was a talking head to which no one was listening.  It was also around that time that we realized that the audience relly wanted to hear and read about its own self. 

We turned the mirror on to the membership.  We mined members’ posts and photos for the best of the best and lined them up with a decent theme (i.e, travel destination) for each issue of the newsletter.  We asked for and gave credit for advice and tips.  We ran contests and glorified the winners.   We did all of these things in the newsletter and every newletter went out through email and remained a prominent link on the homepage.  We made it so easy to see, share and subscribe to the newsletter that it grew daddy long legs.  Eventually, the mirrors were migrated on to the site itself.  Membership soared (as travel blog sites go) and the acquisition followed.

When the membership is the medium, it can happen.

Later,
–B–

The word social has lost meaning.  Reminds me of what happened to the word network.  Nobody knows what I mean when I say ‘network’.  I have to Dymo broadcast or wireless or neural modifiers to it to be understood and I still won’t network with anybody or thing.  How long before the word social becomes a verb?  It’s already too close.  A friend recently promised to socialize me to a business associate.  This is business jargonization at its finestization and it sounds unpleasant.  I wanted to ask instead for an introduction but I didn’t want to out myself for the out-of-it goof that I am.

So now I need to know what social media is.  Is there another kind of media?

So.  I’ve been toe-dipping into the PR world (again… on and off every few years) and I am already ready to pronounce: nothing is changed except the topic.

I take it back.  This has changed: PR is more thoroughly out of control, whether you are client or agency, than it ever was.  At the same time, you are encouraged to believe that PR of a kind never before possible is newly possible thanks to ’social media’.  This is either true and truly enervating or crap and nothing is changed.

What is new is that PR people are being encouraged to believe that social media technologies and networks are together a thing that was conceived in PR heaven just for their use.  This is just silly.  Social media technologies belong to the kids who create them.  And they create them just because it occurs to them to do so, like a primal urge.  (Which makes me think of a  metaphor: PR is the act of rubbing clients’ balloons against walls of primal urges and making the one stick to the other, which effect wears off pretty quickly.)

I’ve gone too far but this much is true: social media is the topic and the fearful chatter is about the loss of control.  Again, this is silly.  Control.  Right.  It’s a primal urge: the urge to control.  Convince me that I have it and I have satisfied a primal urge.  The classic Press Release with pick-ups can be convincing.

The era of the well-crafted message delivered by the well-coiffed talking head is concluded.  Thanks to social media technologies, things are fully and finally out of control, just as any good and interesting conversation should be, and that’s what it is out there.  It is a conversation, or, better still, it is many millions of conversations

You can look at it this way.  Social media is a (potentially) monstrous conference call.  You can tell them anything you want and, realistically, respond to a few questions but then everybody on the call goes away to think, say and do whatever the hell they please.  Nothing has changed except that there are (potentially) millions on the call which is, of course, a good thing.

My snippy attitude will abate, I’m sure, and Toronto’s Social Media Group has already shown me enough to convince me that I should stop right here.  That outfit has found a good way to leverage social media technologies.  They are rubbing their client’s balloons against the walls in the places where the conversation has already started.  It is still about 1) the audience and 2) the creative and they know this but they have found a way to nourish the conversations with and through social media.  (There.  I used the phrase without backhanding it.  My snippy attitude is falling away.)

In a confused nod to McLuhan, I’ll stretch to the close with this: It is still about 1) the audience and 2) the creative so don’t be duped by any technologies, the best of which are wonderfully creative and exactly fitted to their audience (like balloons rubbed against primal walls.)

I did say ‘confused’.

Later
–B–