Looking beyond Social Media hype...

Since arriving at my current organisation and seemingly the only person in the place with the word 'web' in their job title I have become a magnet for a whole bunch of folks, from Marketing and beyond, interested in embarking into the brave new world of Social Media. In fact the CEO himself has said he wants to do more in Web 2.0. When I hear observations that we shouldn't bother with our current WCM efforts and just use Facebook and Twitter I start to worry. Am I missing something here? Is social media really reaching a level and maturity where we should be concentrating all our information and communication management efforts on it?

Over the last couple of months I've learned some interesting things about 'appliance manufacturing'. The first is that it is a surprisingly cut-throat business, with one manufacturer not hesitating to take another to court over the size and shapes of their knobs (you know what I mean and I kid you not). It's also not without its fair share of accidents. Each year brings at least a few suitable nominees for the Darwin Awards and I have heard tales of how people have managed to embed all manner of attachments in themselves while trying to clean appliances while they've been running and then trying to sue the manufacturer. Some of our customer service people have to use two names because they have received unreasonable and abusive approaches from aggrieved customers. Naturally, email and the web have become prime tools for unhappy customers and 'social media' is clearly another potential weapon in the aggrieved's armory.

So it is in this context that I have been getting 'hands on' in social media and trying to understand some of the mechanics from the ground up. If you've read much comment on my blog you'll know that I've been exposed to a lot of hype over the last 20 years and, to my shame, been responsible for creating a fair bit too. And let's not beat about the bush here - there is a hell of a lot of hype around 'social media' at the moment - equivalent I think to the 'one-to-one relationship marketing' and 'personalisation' idealism that helped fuel the original dotcom bubble.

A great example of this is a comment I saw associated with the recent Monitoring Social Media event earlier in the week. "Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it." Now, if you read my previous post you'll see I've been conducting an experiment in Twitter influence and trying to understand to what degree it is valid and to what degree it can be manipulated. On last look, I raised my Klout score by 15 points in just over a week. Looking at other influence monitoring tools like TweetLevel I even discovered I had an influence level equivalent to the founder of CMS Watch - an organisation I have admired for years for its incitefulness and ability to get beyond hype in a crowded and complicated industry. A subsequent communication revealed that said founder and I are agreed that Twitter, although providing professional value, is pseudo-reality. My concern is that the more hype is generated around things like Twitter influence, the more the professional usefulness of the tool will be undermined and it will become a haven for the 'dark side'.

In another communication I received the observation that perhaps these experiments show that "social media expert" is just another word for 'douchebag' and interestingly enough a bit of hunting around revealed an excellent resource on all aspects of social media psychology and 'douchebaggery'. This has led to me questioning that if the 'dark side' of social media and Twitter, in particular, is well-known amongst those who are practised in its use, is this sufficient sanction to prevent these mediums descending into the typical expletive ridden slanging matches of a typical YouTube comment stream? Will the age-old adage from the long-standing newsgroup and debate forums of the last decade of "Don't feed the trolls" work successfully in these newer online communications environments as they reach mass market appeal?

Personally, my recent experiments have revealed to myself that I don't like being a social media jerk and that fulfilling the guidance offered on some of the sites I've read recently is the right way to go. My only hope is that as these environments grow in their popularity and usage that others become similarly enlightened...

It's been a rapid learning exercise but I think I can now offer some wiser counsel to those yet to experiment or really understand these newer social media environments and, once again, to those I may have upset in the process, I am sorry. Once again I seem to be fulfilling a repeated purpose in my life "to serve as a warning to others"