Is social media dead is not the right question to ask

Posted on | March 23, 2011 | 3 Comments

Jonathan Salem Baskin asked yestarday on AdAge “Do Campaign Failures, High-Profile Firings Signal the End of Social Media?” At the same time this question is amusing and a bit alarming too as I think it really is not the right question to ask at all.

Me, I am actually really looking forward to the “death of social media”. I’m looking forward for the times when the hype is behind us and we can concentrate on the real things instead of gimmics. Fundamentally, I think social media as a term is somewhat misused, often used only to put this phenomena into a box, so its easier to understand for the people looking at it from afar.

What people call social media, but what I simply just call the web for the lack of a better term, is a set of disruptive advancements in technology, which enable building new means for us to interact with each other and construct our social network and therefore also our personal reality in new ways.

This fundamentally changes the way people behave and therefore shapes the grand scheme of things within our society, which in turn inspires smart developers develop new and even more innovative technologies and mechanics for us to live our lifes (and make money too). You could argue which drives the change, technological advancements or people – I think it goes hand in hand. Rather than a linear progress, I see it as a circular evolution.

So what should a business do in this context? A set of funny videos (an article well worth reading btw)? Hand out samples of your product for bloggers to try out and hope for a good review? Start a branded Twitter account for the company?

Maybe these too yes, but what a smart CMO does is team up with the rest of the leaders within the company, take the discussion to the next level and ask their management team a bigger strategic question: How does the current landscape, the web included, change our business environment and what should we do about it?

When you have an answer to this, you automatically realize “social media” does not culminate in viral videos or Facebook fan pages. This change is something that the whole company needs to embrace. Your marketing and PR teams can only scratch the surface if understanding how the internet works and affects your business does not go beyond these teams.

Comments