How is social media any different than message boards, emails, IM, the phone, talking to someone on the street, carrier pigeons or smoke signals?
There are all kinds of ways that people can communicate with each other, and all kinds of ways that businesses can communicate with other businesses and consumers. I don’t think that a scarcity of ways to communicate with people is a problem, I think that too many ways to communicate with people is a problem. I don’t think that scarcity of ways to listen to customers is a problem, I think that scarcity of time to listen to customers is a problem (why else are so many corporate call centers automated and outsourced)?
I think short attention spans are a problem. And too many people that like to hear themselves talk and too few people that actually have something interesting to say is a problem. I don’t think that a n-new ways of facilitating communication between [people:people ... companies:people ... companies:companies] is really transforming to the same degree that I read about from so many social media blow-hards who are selling books and themselves on speaking circuits. I think a lot of the folks out there fanning the flames the hardest on social media have a personal and / or commercial axe to grind. There’s a whole lot of fluffy social language being tossed around by folks, and there are a lot of tech PR firms me-too’ing the exact same social media value propositions in their services.
Most times I search on tech topics of interest (virtualization, cloud computing) on social networks, the vast majority of social “conversations” are marketing people from tech vendors pointing back to marketing materials on their web sites. I rarely see actual enterprise IT buyers on social networks expressing their purchase eval questions (that’s what I would find really interesting – not some product marketing person pointing to a webinar / white paper / whatever). If a tech company that sells expensive hardware / software to a C- level technical audience is spending more than a small percentage of their overall sales efforts trolling on Twitter or Facebook for quality leads, I would be very concerned as a stockholder.
I don’t think that today’s social media fervor measures up to the true degree of transformation that is happening. I have read a lot of blogs and books by social media proponents. I have watched a lot of videos, and I have seen some speeches in person. There is a whole lot of fluff, and there are very few truly transformative discussions. I don’t know if that’s more of a statement about social media or about marketing in general, but I feel like I’ve suspended my disbelief for more time than could be reasonably expected, and I’ve spoken with a lot of other tech marketing and PR folks who feel the same way (though they won’t be pulling the “social media services” from their site anytime soon).
I agree that any tech PR firm should be an expert in all the channels to deliver a message (and in some cases, a specific social channel might be the very best channel for delivery of a message to a specific audience). But I think where the true talent lies is still in being able to understand a technology, an audience and a story well enough to tell it in an interesting way. The few people who are really good at that – they are the very best PR people, regardless of whether they are blowing on the social media horn as heavily as everyone else out there.
