The New Connectedness
Technology and the internet have given us greater control over our own media experience – what information we get and share, how we spend our time, and to whom we are connected. We are more diverse as a society, more informed as individuals, and more involved as communities. So what?
This morning I read a column from Media Post about Heather and Mike Spohrs, whose daughter, Madeline, passed away suddenly of respiratory syncytial virus, complicated by her premature birth just 17 months earlier. My wife, Karen Dahl, and I spent a couple of hours the other night, after reading about their story on a blog, reading the twitter updates and blog posts that detailed Madeline’s illness and watching videos and slide shows remembering her short life. My wife cried. I ran upstairs to look in on our 17-month old son, Henry, who was sleeping, and put my hand on his back to feel him breathe, just because I could.
The column was about marketing, but the larger message was that social media gives us the power to change the world — something we have been talking about in the context of WeMedia for years. But more than anything, social media reflects the way we are as people.
As the author, Kristi Faulker, noted:
Let there be no more doubt that the on-line community is, in fact, a community in the truest, human sense. Social media is the uber-gathering space — better than a beauty shop, supermarket, diner, church, pub, firehouse, school, and town square rolled into one. The scale of Facebook or Twitter is global. Yet, when a human story touches our hearts, we react as intently as we would to a crisis in our own neighborhood.
But she also identified a major challenge that comes up in the context of marketing, and really how organizations communicate generally:
As marketers, we seek to quantify the power and penetration of nascent social platforms. What percentage of the target audience is engaged in Twitter? How many women 34-55 are on Facebook? How many eyeballs does this blog get compared to that one? And for heaven sakes, what’s our ROI?
Too many organizations look at social media only as a tactic, another channel, or an opportunity to expand their relationship with the audience for the purpose of increasing sales. All of those things are true about social media — these new tools and communities that form through them have seemingly unlimited potential from a branding and marketing standpoint. But if that is your only focus, or your only understand how what social communities online represent, you are missing out on quite a bit. And by missing out, I mean you are failing to recognize the reasons why people join these communities in the first place, what their expectations are for how the companies and groups they engage should act, and their desire to have an impact in the world that is larger than just one purchase or action. Not only will that limit what you can achieve from a branding and marketing standpoint, in short time, it might take you out of the conversation completely.
When I forwarded the column to my wife, a nonprofit professional and part-time marketer, she wrote back “If only more companies did TRUE good things to take advantage of the communities they could SERVE instead of just using their ‘good’ deeds to SELL stuff to us. We’re not just connected, we care and we’re not idiots who can’t see through to the true intentions.”
As usual, Karen said it better than I ever could.
Take heed marketers (and everyone else) – you have more tools and opportunities available to you in a connected society than ever before, but more is expected of you as well. Everything about how you operate, communicate, educate, engage, and activate people must change. You must change as well, on the inside. Don’t believe me? Keep doing what you are doing… I’ll be here waiting when the audience figures you out.
Brian is Managing Director of little m media which provides strategic guidance and support to organizations around the use of the internet and technology to facilitate communications, engagement, education, and mobilization.
