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04.26.10 Social Media And Your Customers  By Jay BaerMaybe what we need is a little deconstruction. At Monday's Social Fresh conference in St. Louis, I was delighted to join Sarah Evans, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, and Zena Weist on the closing panel discussion. During the session, an audience question got me fired up (no surprise, as the Social Fresh attendees were a very smart, engaged group). A very nice woman (I wish I'd been able to get her name, if you know who it was please leave a comment) asked about discussing the merits of social media participation with a boss who believed it was a fad. First of all, faddishness doesn't invalidate. Sure, the Pet Rock was a fad, but it also made $15 million in six months ($56 million in today's dollars). Second, the social media tools and destinations will inevitably change, but considering 83% of online Americans are active in social media, and there are 425 million people with Facebook accounts, I think we're past the lava lamp stage. But third, and most importantly, conversations about "social media" are amorphous, and largely pointless. Meaning Less In our zest and zeal, our warm embrace of the transformative power of social communication, we've thrown everything we can think of into a bucket, and slapped the "social media" label on it. Our natural desire for compartmentalization and shorthand has caused us to kill the value of "social media" as a descriptor. You'll perhaps remember that "social media" was originally coined to reference user-generated content. And our modern definition of "social media" still includes that component. Problematically, however, the "social media" moniker is now also used to describe a great many things, similar only in that they are online, and involve some form of interaction between customer and company. The difficulty in telling your boss that social media isn't a fad is magnified substantially by the fact that you and she may be looking at social media through entirely different prisms. We'd all be much better off if we stopped lumping everything under the social media, and instead focused more on the SPECIFIC outcomes that socialization of business can produce. Continue reading this article.
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