Nic Hodges has writ­ten an inter­est­ing post where he expresses the view that now that social media is get­ting real, main­stream atten­tion in busi­ness, he believes it has a brand­ing problem.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t think it’s a brand­ing prob­lem per se, but a prob­lem of language.

Those of us who under­stand social media and how it works are so excited by the pos­si­bil­i­ties we try to com­mu­ni­cate to our clients (or whomever) about it in our lan­guage rather than their lan­guage.

It’s not enough to explain the col­lab­o­ra­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties of using wikis for knowl­edge gath­er­ing, or of the abil­ity of Twit­ter to forge con­nec­tions between dis­parate and dis­persed peo­ple, or of the power of blogs as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions tool. We need to engage in our per­fectly nat­ural, enthu­si­as­tic evan­ge­lism in the lan­guage of those with whom we’re talk­ing.

Fail­ing to do so is bel­liger­ent, blind and foolish.

Once we talk to peo­ple about this stuff on their terms, in a way they under­stand, a num­ber of pos­si­bil­i­ties emerge:

  • they will build com­fort with it
  • they will begin to under­stand it
  • they can begin relat­ing it to their problems

It’s only at that point, they can sur­mount the hur­dle of exper­i­men­ta­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion with social tools. It’s only at that point can we get them to try some­thing that looks new but really isn’t.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]