It starts out like a gag but misses a hilarious punchline:
How do you make abject ignorance sociable? By calling it social media.
If the 2010 iteration of social media was a party, everyone would be stood in a big circle with megaphones. The noise would be unbearable, yet the chant from each party would be exactly the same:
My agenda. My agenda. My agenda. My agenda.
When the iPad was launched last weekend, the air was electric with outrage from certain corners denouncing the device as a way of shutting us up.
From the haters, the verdict was simple: “Disgraceful – it’s taking us back to the old days, where broadcasters had all the power. What happened to community content creation?”
This commentary highlights a very important issue. Sure, we’ve become accustomed to being publishers, all. And for sure, we love the liberty it brings.
But let’s face it – we publish for our own benefit, by and large. Remind me: where’s the community in that?
My biggest social media challenge is dropping the megaphone and working with it to listen, to build incredible rapport and dynamite customer relationships.
Let me explain that.
Life is a cauldron of clutter and confusion. I like many of my contemporaries have an addictive personality, which translates as a perpetual nightmare when it comes to working on a dynamite social media strategy.
Ultimately we need to serve our community, so we have to detach ourselves from our own needs and focus on serving those of the people we strive to work with and inspire on a personal level.
Social media, therefore, for me, offers the chance to reach out and better understand what my tribe needs.
That’s why the Social Media Summit 2010 for me represents the best opportunity this year to figure out how to use the system to touch my community in deeper and more meaningful ways than ever before. I’m not a classically trained marketer, nor am I versed in the art of sales. I’m not a counsellor, nor a coach. I just need the smarts and the insight from a bunch of those people at the top of their social media game to lay down the fundamentals for me to build on firm foundations and start rocking some real customer empathy.
Until we all work the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, we may as well go back to those choking days of smoke signals. Such incredible communications tools at our disposal today, yet anthropologically we have evolved little since those days of cave paintings. Isn’t it time we started thinking people, not personal prejudices?