Social media as business sees it (blogworld thematics)
One of the most important reasons for being at blogworldexpo is to review and understand the view of social media from the perspective of those who make their living through and from social media. Here are reports, reviews and reflections on social media as the conference unfolds:
(First up, discussion panel on Social media success stories)
Alice.com: how to use social media to sell basic household good – toilet paper and so on?. Passion and energy of users. Would assert that one of the key dynamics here is to embed within the selling of products the everyday contexts of use, creating a deeper and richer sense of what ‘experience’ or ‘identity’ one is buying. New company, social media makes the brand visible, rapidly.
Comcast – a defacto case study of customer service online: “how do I get into the social media space?” – very common theme. Success, however, comes from: passion. Frank, guru of this, emphasises passion about customers and this can be unleashed through social media – get people “out there” discussing the brand. Passion is a key term in sessions today; there’s a deep evangelism here marking out social media as an open and entrepreneurial space, not well understood, not yet reduced to dispassionate rhythms marked by bureaucratic (efficiency oriented) systems. “I can know why people are calling Comcast [via twitter] before they even call us”. The “customer story” is what motivates improvements in the culture of consumer care; the numbers don’t speak, the ‘story’ does.
Oscar Mayer (Weinermobile – Hotdoggerblog.com)
Taking an old idea and developing it into the social media space; large company, management worried; making old brand relevant to new people; ‘continuing the journey on the hotdog highway with the weinermobile’. Social media as space which allows people to be honest about what they think [ link back to mommy bloggers as authentic]; emphasised in questions: authenticity matters – does the net encourage this?
Caminito Argentinian Steak house
Situation was – restaurant losing money badly; 80% of marketing spent on the 1 newspaper ad; nothing on social channels. Goal was to own first page of google for this particular small steakhouse. “for your average consumer, they don’t know who SEO works” – so, again, there is a degree of explicit manipulation of the market space?
Ideas and specific takeaways
- From business perspective, social media seems to be strongly linked to creating an identifiable individual consumer as a real person, not just as a demographic or number on a chart; (Comcast and the ‘story’ anecdote).
- Differentiation in the business view of social media: is it a public space or not? eg twitter v facebook; importance of public spaces for searching, also a sense of honesty in these spaces.
- People in business often emphasise how neat it is that things are popular virally, rather than paid direct advertising. There’s a strong ‘this is so much cheaper, freer’ line which is a close parallel of the opensource and other aspects of the net as cultural form.
- Importance of recognising conversations about brands happen all the time, marketing is about getting into those conversations even if they are bad. “Humanise the brand”
- Large companies are afraid of social media; internal dynamics from corporate marketing – control of the message.
Conclusion
Reviewing several conversations and sessions over the past two days, one of the main issues that emerges is the difference between media-as-information and media-as-marketing channel. Many of the speakers and attendees don’t differentiate between ‘the media’ as a general social phenomenon and ‘marketing’ that can be conducted through the media. Thus, social media, as business sees it, is simple a vast new array of marketing opportunities; there is no concern or issue with the degree to which a consumerisation of the Internet might or might not fit with its underlying qualities, nor with other desires or interests or politics. For this reason, I think, the ethical issues raised in one session, on mommyblogging were difficult to resolve, and not expected because traditional ‘media’ (marketing) read social media as undifferentiated from the entirely commercialised space, in the USA, of media generally. Ultimately, then, the challenge for the future of the development of social media is for people to navigate between conflicting expectations which are coded into the technologies we use; the challenge for the blogorg (the community of bloggers who identify as such) is to develop ethical practices which understand the ominvorous capacity of ‘the media’ (mostly marketing)
Reflections
The speakers articulate sophisticated theories of identity and interpersonal communications (for example, discussion of the value of personalising corp identity via real-people pictures on twitter); these are mobilised and deployed unselfconsciously, yet are often blind (at least explicitly) to other dimensions of the broad problem. Two examples from the SM session from day 1 of the conferences:
- failure to discuss the internal politics of PR v the rest of the company, even though the problem is identified (eg social media is about culture of business, especially large)
- how do you listen to the stories of people not using social media?
The critical issue of brands emerges from RJ’s Technorati keynote – “brands are in the blogosphere”; social media, from a marketing perspective, is all about the way brands get spoken, not just presented to society.