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Social media reveals underlying poor understanding of online communication

Posted by Jaan on September 11th, 2008 | Add your comment

Businesses all around the world are interested in making social media part of their external communications. Unfortunately the understanding of what “social” actually means is pretty poor. (While agencies have a duty to educate their clients I won’t go in to that now as I touched on the topic in a recent post.)

What is more important is what social media as a concept does to a lot of agencies and clients.

In short, it lays bare their fundamental lack of knowledge on how to communicate online.

When web sites were static boxes of relevant but rarely updated and never interacted with content, it didn’t matter. Actually it did matter, but not in a way that anyone understood at the time. The success of a corporate web site was judged on whether it killed off the business or not. If it didn’t, and if it had an email link on it, then it was a good site.

Adding a social media component, or even just a forum, revealed some ugly truths. The audiences weren’t happy with what the site’s owner had decided to show them. They wanted something else; they wanted real answers, timely and relevant information. They wanted to talk with someone, not be talked at.

While it is tempting for many in our industry today to sell the client anything as long as it satisfies the client’s hunger for all things social or “web 2.0″, it is important to take a step back. Otherwise the client will be buying sites and apps that will fail much less gracefully than those old sites that no one really knew how to judge the success of anyway (ok, I’m generalizing but stay with me).

Judging a “social” initiative is simple, if you as a client only get 50 people signed up to your new snazzy hardware product social network you’ve failed. No doubt about it. A collaborative feature where no one collaborates or a user powered help desk where no one contributes are also failures.

It’s not the fault of the technology, or the design, or the SEO. Nine times out of ten the project failed because no one really cared about what it was that the project actually needed to achieve, and how to accomplish it. And that’s because the people buying and selling the site or app or service didn’t understand online communication well enough. It’s that simple.

Just as the first dot com bust weeded out the gold diggers, the rise of social media in the business world will marginalize those on both the agency and client side that don’t understand the topic and opportunities well enough.

On the other hand, those that care to learn how online communication actually works will not only be kick-butt good at all things social (and other concepts), they will also reap the personal, financial and whuffie* rewards that come with it. More knowledgeable agencies lead to more knowledgeable clients, which leads to more knowledgeable agencies which leads to…

For online audiences everywhere this is very good news.