Predicting a Social Media Based Society

As a media marketer, I've been awed by the impact of social media on all our lives for a while now. In a Faith Popcorn moment recently I was trying to imagine the even greater impact it will have on society down-the-road. Will the transparency social networking forces on brands now drive us to be kinder, gentler human brands because of the power of mob to criticize? We already open ourselves up to criticism for every opinion posted. And we make instant heroes of the Steven Slaters of the world (212,000 Facebook fans and counting) who act out secret fantasies in public.

So, think about where will we be as the walls are continuously torn down... where that will put us in 20, 30 years under our belts of a medium that is only in its toddler-dom today?
What adjustments will we make?
Will the pendulum swing backwards to greater privacy than ever, as a backlash to too much crowd judgments on every move one makes?
Will it burst open even further and manners and mores be damned?
Will we become vanilla pudding, scared to make a move or take a stance?

I wonder.

Tamar Weinberg wrote a nice blog on balancing social media social lives and blending with relationships offline, applying practices of one on the other.

As social media enthusiasts, we often forget that we live in a different type of world than everyone else. We might be more keen to open up to strangers and share our feelings with people we don’t know. It’s the world we’re living in — for us, at least, and it will continue as we spread these ideas to our peers and colleagues, all of whom will likely slowly open up to this world in due time. All paths will ultimately lead to here whether or not these “outsiders” have chosen to accept it yet.

Faith Popcorn, criticized by some, lauded by others, predicts less conspicuous consumption (driven by fear of criticism again or is it the economy, stupid?...though we won't hesitate to rubberneck in awe of a Real Housewives' lifestyle and shop their bankruptcy sale). Either way, social media is part of the problem and the solution:

Amy Avitabile, senior vice president of marketing at Lord & Taylor, called the use of social networking a “complete game-changer.” Lord & Taylor is using Facebook and Twitter in nonpromotional ways. It also has a mobile strategy for messaging. While Lord & Taylor was late to the party with e-commerce (its site is less than two years old) “it’s the number-one trending door by a lot,” she said....

“Our big message was to alleviate the guilt of shopping,” said Avitabile. “We don’t sell things she needs, but what she wants.” So the store developed the “Shop Smart” campaign, created by David Lipman with the tag line “Shop More, Guilt Less.”

Popcorn also thinks supermarkets will work to compete with local farmer's markets' rise in popularity but may fail without "authenticity and transparency." Why? Again, because of social media, and our ability as consumers -- or just humans -- to point fingers and get to the truth.
Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thoughts? Criticisms on this post? Please share, but leave the prussic acid at home.

Looking Up

My dear friend Rita, a respected businesswoman in the marketing world, forwarded me a link to Pete Blackshaw's column today in AdAge. I was very moved by the piece and submitted a long comment back to Pete, but the topic is worth a couple hundred extra words...at least.

Pete, a regular AdAge columnist and VP at Nielsen Online Digital Strategy, lost his sister recently. He became aware of the contrast between real, deep offline connections and community created by her passing and shared grief and support vs the surface kinds of connections we are all running after in our online world. Here's a link to his column: http://bit.ly/Blackshaw-adage

I found myself buying every admonishment and silently vowing to work those offline relationships harder than my Twitter-based ones, but found the comments posted very interesting for the push back from a few readers. This is actually why online conversations can be so important and compelling. We actually have more opportunity than ever before to share and hear other opinions. This hopefully will make the world a little smaller, but it also reminds me of the need to remember the middle ground.

Here's what I wrote in response to Pete's column and others' comments:

"Pete, I too am sorry for your loss, and sadly grateful for the column it inspired.

Yes, there are those who feel the connection you made between your experience of a family member's death, offline, with the lifestyle we live now, online, was "kind of too much" or "nearly blasphemous."
And others will share the pathos completely and hang their heads in shame for a moment vs just hanging their heads down over a smartphone, thanks to the reminder that we need to emerge from our avatar-selves and raise our eyes and our consciousness more frequently, and seize the offline day too.

That said, the ship has sailed and I fear we won't easily be able to find our way back to the kind of connections we SHOULD have. I'm guilty of missing the chance to share a smile or receiving one, and have heard annoyed passersby say, "Look up!" And I've been annoyed in return to see every single person on the train completely absorbed in their own digital world.

Tim Sanders wrote his book, Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends back in 2002 on the premise that "being a lovecat" is the only way to succeed in the 21st century, and necessary to overcome our Dilbert society of isolation in cubbies.

We crave community. I think we're creating it in any way we can.

Digitally, time suck that it is, is just easier for many. Unfortunately, we end up back in the digital version of a cubbie after all.

Thank you for the excellent reminder to look up."

Socially Transmitted Dis-Ease

I've been putting together a How-to deck on participating in social media at the request of a client. I feel like the guy on that commercial whose wife comes downstairs in the morning to find him up all night, sitting slack-jawed and messy-haired. He tells her that he just got to the end of the internet.

Only we, of course, never do.

It's an addiction. A compulsion. A necessity. As an advisor or resource, staying one, or preferably three, steps ahead of the average guy's knowledge is like being in a constant race to a never approaching finish line. So over the next few days or weeks, I'll try to share some of the elements I'm going to share with my client as I pull together reframe some of the basics for them.

Overarching Rules for Social Networking Participation Part 1:

• If you don’t know anyone, but want them to know you, blog
• If you don’t know them, don’t friend them on Facebook
• If you don’t know them, but wish you did, try to connect with them on LinkedIn
• If you don’t know them, but they are a good resource, do follow them on Twitter (@mossappeal )
• If you don't know what they're saying about you and want to know (which we all need to know before diving in for business reasons), by all means, ask. And I do mean "by all means," like Google yourself, set Google alerts, Monitorr yourself, and pose some questions!
  

Have at it.

Where Social Media Gets Unsocial

1/17 Update: Just had to add these links:
http://hub.tm/?RHCDB
which sums it all up...
And this from David Pogue:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/twittering-tips-for-beginners/
(er, note: his article was written days after my entry appeared! Maybe I have a future?... Then again, we're all frustrated and expounding on tech-headaches.)

Just I'd love to wish you (all two of my faithful readers) a Happy New Year. But I'm not sure if you'll ever see this because I haven't really figured out how to enable my blog to be fed for greater consumption. I just can't digest all the new social media bites and bytes. And I'm hungry for more scoop. There's definitely a food theme going on here that I have to stop.

Anyway, a funny thing happened to a friend of mine on the way to my apartment. I'd sent an evite to a few folks for some holiday fare. (yes, more food.) Now, Cecilia is a making social media her career choice. She has uncovered all kinds of cool tools and sites and is starting to tweet, twitter, blog, maybe vlog, who knows. But she called me two minutes before my soiree and said she couldn't find my apartment because she'd lost my evite.

Today, I tried to RSVP to HER holiday party, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out which application/platform/email address she'd sent her party non-Evite invitation to, so I couldn't find the invite. NON-e-vite because she discovered the not-your-grandfathers-electronic-invitation-service dejour and used THAT service and I can't remember the name of it. Purple something. Wait - I looked in my Web history and found it!! Purple Trail.

Remember the days when using email we were nostalgic about snail mail and phones? Now I'm nostalgic about email! I guess I'll just pick up the phone and actually call her.

So, if you're reading this that means I'm still alive and writing and you're alive and reading, so I wish you all the very best for a wonderful 2009 filled with lots of happy moments when we all reach out and touch people.

Post Script: I have NO idea if those on the alert for my latest postings received multiple alerts about this one, but in the spirit of full disclosure since social media is notorious for transparency and crowdsourcing critics I revised this twice to keep the crowds happy. Sorry for the repeat blast. But real live friends are more...or at least as...important as the virtual ones.

Facebooking the Music

Had a biz lunch with a rep at Broadway Video, which is the mac-daddy of production/ duplication/ editing companies (Ask for Mort and tell him E.B. sent you!) We were talking about social media, and Mort was saying that he needed to know more about the whole Facebook, etc., phenomenon. The reason? He personally experienced its DWOM (digital word-of-mouth) power:

He got a call from his nephew saying, "What's up with so-and-so?"
"Whaddaya mean," Mort asked.
"I read that he's in the hospital!"

Turns out, the family -- at least the younger set -- was pretty connected through Facebook, and the nephew read about the family member before anyone had a chance to call Mort! (The guy's okay.)

I'm still figuring out my way around Facebook, and while I'm actually ahead of the curve compared to some of my peers and pals since I've actually had a profile posted and have added "friends" for months now, I'm way late to the game compared the average 18 year old.

Every 40+ Facebooker's got a story of how they icked out their son/daughter, etc. when they found each other on the site. We invaded their turf and they're starting to move out, of like a neighborhood going through a gentrification. We're migrating from LinkedIn and changing the Facebook landscape to be more of a business networking tool, and they're moving off to greener pastures and social tools.

Applying the Facebook power to business is a double-edged sword, though. It's great to use for outreach and creating buzz or connections, and you can have a lot of fun building a community in our increasingly isolated world. But...and this isn't news, but bears repeating...you want to make sure you're giving the "right" impression, since you probably don't want to post that picture of you crushing a beer can on your forehead or worse, (supply your own visual here).

At Monday's Small Business Technology Summit, sales training pro Adrian Miller repeated the advice about carefully considering what you post:
"Think of your Facebook profile like your desk top. Would you want those pictures in your office for your boss to see?"

That advice applies to the "younger set," too. There are a zillion examples of bad judgement showing up later to bite one in the behind from aspiring Miss Americas to Minneapolis students. But we're all so eager for our 15 minutes of fame or so myopic about the pervasiveness of the internet that we post with abandon. (Yikes. Blogger heal thyself?)