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Mostly.

EDIT: And when I say “mostly”, I mean mar­ket­ing ulti­mately focused on get­ting peo­ple to buy stuff. Not on chang­ing opin­ion, not on aware­ness. It’s a delib­er­ately nar­row def­i­n­i­tion for the pur­poses of this post.

I’m going to try to be con­cise as I put this out there for your amuse­ment. I say this as I’m inclined to go off on a ranty dia­tribe about this as I have strong feel­ings about it. It’s also the posi­tion I think I’ll be tak­ing at the sec­ond SMC Syd­ney that I’m part of the panel for next Mon­day night.

I’ve been work­ing with col­lab­o­ra­tive projects and com­mu­ni­ties of com­mon inter­est for a long time now. In one way, shape or form, I’d haz­ard about 10 years. In terms of work­ing with and using the tools and classes of soft­ware we’re now call­ing social media — wikis, blogs, social net­works, ideas mar­kets, and their var­i­ous pre­de­ces­sors — I’ve got more than a lit­tle expe­ri­ence as a user and imple­menter of them through­out my career.

Because of this expe­ri­ence, I have well-​​formed views about what the great­est ben­e­fit these tools can offer are. And it’s not in mar­ket­ing.

Let me start with a a defin­i­tive statement.

I’m not anti-​​marketing. I’m not even anti social media mar­ket­ing. But col­lec­tively the sell­ing com­po­nent of mar­ket­ing is pos­si­bly the least inter­est­ing thing about social media.

In fact, there are some incred­i­bly smart peo­ple who work in mar­ket­ing and really, really under­stand social media and its ben­e­fits. They are try­ing hard to make a dif­fer­ence. You know who you are (I have my own lit­tle list in my head).

But there’s a long way to go before the mar­ket­ing indus­try as a whole really gets social media.

I think it’s great that we can mea­sure around com­mu­nity engage­ment with social media cam­paigns. How­ever, as some­one who’s worked with com­mu­ni­ties and social soft­ware a lot longer than the mar­ket­ing indus­try has had its knick­ers in a twist about it, I find it more than a lit­tle amus­ing that the indus­try often seems to think that their busi­ness is what social media is all about.

Wake up people!

It’s not about how JOO CAN SELL MOAR STUFFZ!!!!!!!

It’s not about eyeballs.

Find­ing the con­nec­tors on Face­book and giv­ing them a video cam­era and a Summer’s worth of beer does not a con­nected, nur­tured, col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity make.

What social media is about is the com­mu­nity. It’s about how much you actu­ally care for them. About how much you con­nect with them and nur­ture them. It’s about how much that ties in to your larger, long term busi­ness strat­egy. It’s about inno­va­tion and shar­ing and empow­er­ment and knowl­edge and build­ing some­thing sus­tain­able over the long term. It’s about peo­ple and the way they come together do do some­thing more than they could alone.

And there are few social media mar­ket­ing cam­paigns I’ve seen that do much, if any, of that. They scratch around the edges. They say the right words but they have dead eyes.

As a prag­matic Clue­trainer, I get the feel­ing that most cam­paigns that seek to incor­po­rate social media wouldn’t know the Clue­train if it ran up and whacked them upside the head.

Of course, this is all just one person’s view. Your mileage may vary (and I hope it does).

Mostly.

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