I have always been an advertising person in its former and current evolutions. I have worked for many of the top agencies in Canada and the U.S.
The advertising world can be a world of hype and personal promotion. The stakes in the show are high.
No matter what agency, no matter what country, no matter what office you would run who made a lot of noise and took up a lot of sound space but in the end turned out to be an empty suit. They had the great suit, the great jokes, and the great connections but in the end when it got down to work little original thought. They followed the herd and the herd initially followed them. They were lemmings.
But it was very difficult to hide in those days. While advertising is an art, it is also a science and fact and research based. When they were given a segmentation study to interpret and present recommendations the empty suits withered. You couldn’t do the analysis in 140 characters.
Once the initial layer of the onion was peeled the empty suits were quickly found out.
In social media it is a little harder to identify today’s empty suits. My measuring stick is my past experience of clients who could take you apart with their knowledge. Social media makes that assessment a little bit harder. It is not their fault as social media is the epicenter of hype so many people in today’s get caught up in the frenzy.
I have always said that social media is akin to a fire hose. It gushes information and changes at the infinite speed of the internet. I agree with Brian Solis, who I saw at a Linkedin event in OC recently, when he said that we can’t keep up with our social media evolution.
What amazes me about many futurists of today is how little they know of the past. When I ask them if they have heard of Marshall McLuhan they draw a blank. They don’t know a person who coined the terms the Medium is the Message or it is a Global Village. Television is hot, print is cool. They stand the test of time even though the test of time was the 60’s. I don’t even bring up Alvin Toffler and his thoughts about too much change in too short a period of time, Buckminster Fuller or others.
I also remember a little more than a decade ago when we had the dotcom boom when companies with no revenues were capitalized as being worth more than General Motors. Then we quickly had the dotcom bust and lots of casualties on the street. You can read about them in the biggest dotcom busts. We had advocates and zealots then and we have them now.
Today’s Social Media Experts quote stats to support the growth of social media and the fact that it is ubiquitous. Then I read that many of those mail boxes are empty. Nobody is home.
In 2010 I read an article called Guess who doesn’t tweet. Almost nobody. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/127414/guess-who-doesnt-tweet-almost-everyone.html
A couple of weeks ago I read that many social media accounts are dormant. Nothing has changed.
http://www.comparz.com/blog/entry/businesses-beware-social-medias-ghosts-ciphers-and-shadow-members
Many social media experts rarely touch Main Street and talk to clones of themselves. They live in a homogenous community of like minded people. They should travel more without their smart phones. Tweet less. Talk less. Listen more. Watch more. Talk to people more.
I like to get my knowledge from people who have a broader perspective than just one channel and be guided into the future by people who know more than just one road.
A few months ago I saw a well respected Social media expert that has written many books. They talked about the mechanics of their process. They said that their content wasn’t original but came from a couple of sources; that they automated their tweets, didn’t respond to retweets, and had other people doing this for them. Then they talked about how this built community. What popped into my mind was the thought that I hoped they didn’t parent this way.
Although social media is vast and pervasive it is also unruly. Most CEO’s I talk to consider it a necessary evil more than necessary.
There are no widely accepted ROI tools that are the standardized norm in the industry like you used to have Nielsen reports, Starch reports, or Nielson ratings or a myriad of quantitative research tools. The world was often over analyzed.
Now we have hype and opinion from people who wouldn’t know a GRP from a SKU or an electronically optimized press release.
Maybe it’s time for them to fill their experiences with broader perspectives for true insight.
You can connect with Hank on Linkedin.
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Here is one on Networking Tips for People Who Hate to Network.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7QgkLCRq4o&list=UUEigDTyDiFGXVfyg7sRErOg&index=5&feature=plcp
Completely agree with your insights. We do a lot of work in the funeral industry, and the younger operators are gung-ho for social media. They’re missing the fact that the audience is mostly over 50, and hardly engage in social media. A slightly different take on the point is our latest post: “Social Media Isn’t What You Tweet” http://laadsmarketingblog.com/
Keep ’em coming, Hank.
Dan
Yes.
There’s so much crap in the social media space. As you point out, advertising is a combination of art and science and the social space seems so enthralled at the medium that it forgets both art and science. Something crawls across the computer screen, spins around and explodes into the logo…there you go, that will be $50,000. Last year, someone brought in a speaker who did the top 10 social media ads and I thought all 10 were bad.
No such thing as an expert in social media. Like you point out, it changes so fast that no one can be an expert in this area of marketing. I know a lot about social media as part of Inbound Marketing, I refer to myself as a Social Media Explorer, looking forward, adapting to the changes. Traditional forms of marketing have not gone away and every business has to incorporate those tools – social included – that will best reach their prospect and customer.
Thank you for another article worth reading. Social media has its place, but it is reassuring to hear someone say that it is not the be all and end all.