I read an article today over at AdAge.com by Pete Blackshaw titled ‘Who Owns Social Anyway?’ and enjoyed one thing in particular in his article.  Pete pointed out the left-brain, right-brain battle many of us feel in social media. 

For me at least, there is a desire to place some structure around our behavior and activity while simultaneously wanting to rebel and rail against structure in the pursuit of a social presence that is genuine and honest in the content and thus, often produced in the spirit of a just-in-time, get it our the door to share mentality.

This pushmi-pullyu split personality then asked if the advent of social media might have unintentionally lowered the bar for good creative efforts.  Witness the amazing visitor counts ‘Fred Figglehorn’ has produced on YouTube (471M at last count) and his stuff is, hmmm… to my ears irritating, to say the best and the product demonstrates low production values to say the least, but that is all a part of Fred’s allure – it’s fresh and edgy, which is appealing to that audience segment.

Contrast it to the segments of WillItBlend.com. This is another YouTube channel, this one for the people at BlendTec.  They have a higher degree of production values (sets, multiple camera angles and audio editing) and the content is directly aligned with their product, high-quality home blenders that can take what you throw at them.  They have a little over 108M views vs. Freds 471M, albeit Fred has a years head start on them.

So does social media lower the bar for creative? Is it more important to get something posted and out there than spending a lot more time & money on quality creative content?  *sigh* I think so… I believe it is much more important to engage the audience than to refine, refine, and refine again to the point the content is so flashy and the message is well presented, but the urgency and edginess that connects the producer to the audience to the moment is lost.

Should you do any production work then?  Yes, some scrubbing of video or audio prior to posting is good, you can lightly massage the content, leave in all the message, but the real message here is to get the content out there and let the audience decide what the value is.

Social Marketing Conversations Soft-launch

To that end I present to you all the new brand of ‘Social Marketing Conversations’ – a relaunch of my evolving personal brand and company around the upcoming book Guy Powell, Jerry Dimos and I are writing on the topic of ROI in social media – it is not done yet and there are several components of the business model that are still in process, but I felt it important to get the name and the company launched. 

I will put up a separate post on the new company, update my ‘About’ page and connect it to the new Facebook page (www.Facebook.com/SocialMarketingConversations), so you can get a sense on what it is all about, but the last several weeks have been a real grind in getting the manuscript to the point where we’re all about ready to release it and get it to the publisher (John Wiley & Sons – the same people who do the ‘Dummy’ series).

I read the Adage article and have been doing a lot of busy work, but this subject came up and I knew that a post on just get it out there was relevant and a great topic to get me posting again here at SocialMarketingConversations.com. 

Thanks for visiting and reading – see you in social media!

Image Courtesy of Shane Willis / MC MECHANIC – HAND FIXING HAND – Homage to MC Escher

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These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

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They were coming from a position that they were getting tired of the mainstream usage of the phrase ‘social media’ and I was coming from an observation that in the very near future, all media will be social and that as a culture, we will expect, nay demand, our interaction with the media around us to provide the opportunity to be social.

The model of interaction and development of advertising, marketing and corporate communications is destined to undergo still even more radical changes based on the principals and paradigms of what we call today, social media.

The dampener on the explosion of social media is the inability of brands and corporation to control the messages related to their brand.  When this comes up, I find myself stating that “control is an illusion, at best, you can try to herd cats” when it comes to social media.

Case in point is a blog post I came across by a UK blogger, Henry Tapper, who writes at henrytapper.wordpress.com.  He posted a link on a LinkedIn group to his blog asking, “Do we understand the risks to our business of social media?“

I clicked through and read his post, in which he commented about the attention that needs to be paid to staff participation in social media, particularly when it involves a financial service company.  There is the potential for quite a lot of damage to be done by a rogue employee who posts trade secrets or confidential memos online.

At TheSocialMediaBible.com, this question comes up quite a lot from all types of companies.  While I cannot disagree with the sentiment, I predict that we’ll see companies who can withstand the scrutiny of an open, public examination prospering and those who try to shrink or control a social media-based interaction diminishing.

The impact that social media supports or, in another perspective threatens, is a function of the open, all inclusive characteristic of the genre – it’s organic, based on human need / desire to interact and I’m not at all sure that it can be contained.

If we look at it from another angle, I’ll ask how CAN you prevent staff from participating in social media?  With the growth of smartphones to facilitate access and short of making non-participation in any social media a condition of employment, I am not sure that this does not bridge over in to 1st amendment territory in the US.

So if the overwhelming movement in media is to a model that demands more and more social interaction, I wonder what the outcome will be.  An anarchy of uncontrolled messaging that impacts brands and companies at will, or even more attempts to contain the uncontainable nature of human interactions?

We live in interesting times, yes?

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