Is social media the new town crier?

Posted on | February 4, 2010 | No Comments

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! A crier stood in the mid­dle of a town and shouted his announce­ment to the peo­ple of the town. In the mid­dle ages they demanded silence and every­one lis­tened. Social media is dif­fer­ent in that way. Today you are announc­ing your mes­sage to your friends, fol­low­ers or con­nec­tions against a lot of other noise. So how do you get heard?

If you shout loud your com­pe­ti­tion shouts louder and so we end up with a never end­ing spi­ral of noise. We have all become mas­ters at block­ing out the noise we don’t want to hear. I believe the answer lies in that state­ment with the word “want” the promi­nent word. You need to tar­get your mes­sage at peo­ple who want to hear it.

There are many rea­sons that peo­ple will want to hear your mes­sage. When I con­sider Face­book I want to hear updates from peo­ple I care about, peo­ple I have a rela­tion­ships with. I also want to hear updates from groups I joined because it is about top­ics I am inter­ested in. On Twit­ter I like to read updates from peo­ple I find inter­est­ing, some­times because I admire them, other times because they pro­vide me with knowl­edge or entertainment.

In Linkedin some of my groups pro­vide me with infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sions that help me under­stand oth­ers view points or intro­duce new con­cepts, ideas and prod­ucts. The inter­est­ing thing in all of this is that it is dri­ven my me and my inter­ests rather than oth­ers pur­su­ing me. I am in con­trol of what I con­sume rather than the other way around. So I can walk away from the town crier and ignore what he says.

So where does this leave busi­ness? This is against how busi­ness has always been done. Busi­ness always con­trolled the mes­sage and what went out. So does busi­ness just ignore this or do they find a way to engage. You hear some peo­ple say that social media suits some indus­tries bet­ter than oth­ers and they may be right. But, they may be wrong too. Maybe some busi­nesses and indus­tries are just doing it bet­ter than oth­ers and adopt new tech­nolo­gies and ways of doing busi­ness ear­lier, eas­ier and better.

Busi­nesses should be sit­ting down and think­ing about what they want to or could achieve from social media. Is it a PR tool, a sales tool, a brand­ing tool, a rela­tion­ship build­ing tool or any other tool? Tak­ing social media on face value and believ­ing that it has no place with­out con­sid­er­ing what it could mean to your busi­ness could be a crit­i­cal mis­take, espe­cially if your com­pe­ti­tion fig­ures it out before you.

I also think busi­ness needs to eval­u­ate their expec­ta­tions of social media. Do you expect imme­di­ate return and imme­di­ate won­ders? Would you expect this of another invest­ment? I think if we can set a clear strat­egy, with real­is­tic objec­tives and a prac­ti­cal plan we could man­age expec­ta­tions and a lot more peo­ple will be less dis­ap­pointed by what the hype has promised.
What do you think the answer to get­ting heard is?

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