We were trying to figure out what program had been used to create the presentation that was sitting idly on the laptop in front of us. I think it was Keynote. Actually we were waiting in the schick office in Malmo because our lecturer Tomas was stuck in his car outside the building and needed to be cut free with the Jaws of Life after his car accident.
The interior of the agency looked a lot like other media agencies I've visited: open plan, stylish, desks cluttered with things. All the interior walls in the place were glass: the sort of environment that aims to breed creativity.
We were there to experience a presentation given to us as part of our master's program in Entrepreneurship, but its focus was very much on social media and whether it was a fad or not. The resounding message from the presentation was: "Use social media to join the conversation with customers, or your days are numbered."
The presentation was classic ad agency style: lots of clean pictures and flashy graphics, sound and so on. It was a nice flash back to my first degree in Australia, which focused on advertising.
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| Do you exist now? Will you exist tomorrow? |
In a world that has changed from a top down information flow to where "we have the microphone" social media is now more interesting and more important than ever before: the days of traditional media (TV, radio, print) are gone, as are the seemingly worthless years of Web 1.0.
Thinking back, I don't even know what I used to do on the internet before things like Google and Facebook rose to prominence and we all could participate. I mean seriously? What were people doing online back then? Using the internet in 2000 was something like going for a drive down the highway just to see the different billboards.
Now that the internet more closely resembles a room of talking people, like a bar, rather than one person talking over our heads, like a lecture, companies (and we ourselves) need to take a very proactive stance in order to be seen and heard in the world. After all, if it isn't online it doesn't exist, right?
And in a world where increasingly huge numbers of people are able to participate (around a third of the world uses internet every day) we need to get smarter and smarter if we want to be the ones who have a say in how the message is broadcast.
It's both scary and exciting at the same time, but are we becoming more sophisticated?
It is now the age of "oh I need to get online and have a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page." Sure many companies need to do that, but just becuase we have one, does it mean that we are more sophisticated communicators? Are we getting our message across effectively?
Facebook and Twitter have now been around for a few years, but many people still have no idea how to use them properly. Sure you made a group or fanpage or a twitter account, but no one is looking at it because no can see it.
I think I am seeing a gradual shift away from social-media-for-the-sake-of-it mania towards a more useful and balanced approach combining new and old media in a complementary way: by the industry leaders that is. People are now playing to the strengths of the media and have worked out how to use it effectively.
Of course for every industry leader in marketing and communications there are thousands and thousands of stragglers. Many give up, some get better, but social media is starting to mature.
Its those stragglers that inspire talks like the one we had. The Duffy Agency (and probably every other media agency in the world) are still having to spend time and money to convince their client that social media could be useful for them.
No ostrich ever survived by sticking its head in the sand. Until we all start to understand the pros and cons of social media thoroughly, there will always be a debate around what is it useful for and whether we should use it for our own purposes.
Like a well-edited mainstream article... I mean, seriously, you take this stuff at face value? I would argue that the influence of business on social networks has caused them to become distorted. There is not that much space of self-expression. Facebook is basically geared to be a tool for advertising and all sorts of other gimmicks. And then I have to say - there was plenty of stuff on the internet in 2000. I was on forums way before that, since the mid-1990s. And IRC was a very vibrant environment, even more so in Lithuania than in the US. Because of the narrower locale, lots of people met through IRC and then on to real life without the stigma of being nerds or being paranoid about weird strangers from the internet, as was the case in American culture back then. Even some of my best friends right now I met through the Lithuanian IRC, which is now basically dead because of being overtaken by these modern social networks. In retrospect the ascii world of IRC was much more personalized precisely because it was much more basic and neutral both in the commercial sense and in its format. So anyway, being your friend and all, I think this is all howash and you're just regurgitating whatever brainwashing your received :)
ReplyDeleteThe question is Martynai, what is the purpose of these social networks? Are they intended for marketing or for you to really make friends and bond with one another? There's no such thing as a free lunch and no one is going to put that much work into a website unless there is some sort of reward.
ReplyDeleteAs time goes on, this medium will become more and more permeated by advertising and then something new and ad-free will pop up. Eventually when the giants of the industry cross that invisible line, people will have had enough and leave to use other methods to communicate. It's already happening with some people to an extent.
But the question I'm asking is whether or not marketers understand the medium of online social media or whether they just bombard you with loads of crap you don't want to read. If an ad is well targeted, it goes from being an interruption to being a service because it's something you would actually like to look at. Eventually that's where marketers want to be. At the moment people aren't as sophisticated at that for a number of reasons.