Posts made in April, 2011
Why you should care about 4Square.
Mark my words, Geo-location will be at the heart of Social Media.
Social Media Is About Me.
I had the good fortune to hear Peter Theil speak a few weeks ago. He shared a lot of wisdom from behind his podium — one memorable moment for me was his answer to the question “why did Facebook succeed where other social networks (ie. MySpace) stalled out?”
His answer was simple and elegant. “MySpace was started in LA as a place where people went to become somebody else. Facebook was started in Boston as a place where people went to be themselves.”
I have always said that Social Media is a channel of “people stories” but Peter’s insight into what made Facebook successful adds further context. The people stories are real, they represent a collective human experience and every individual user is part of it.
Essentially, Social Networking is about real people and the connections between them. However, social media is also a highly individual experience — I experience social media through my “social graph” and my experience is different than your experience. Social media is about me — it’s the place I go to be myself.
Mobile Is My Gateway
Like many folks today, I am constantly on the go. Like many folks today, my mobile phone has become an appendage. My mobile phone is what connects me to my digital world no matter where I am. Mobile is the gateway I use to access information, make connections and “plug in” to my social graph.
The use and adoption of mobile is critical to the thesis of this blog post ( “geo-location is the heart of social). If the stats are true and by 2014 a person’s first online experience will be via a mobile phone not via a computer, then mobile and social will converge — social media becomes more than just being “about me,” it becomes being about me and… where I am and what I am doing. Everything that I do is tagged by “where I did it” and the mobile device becomes the conduit to sending and receiving that information — mobile provides context to everything about me.
I “Check In,” Therefore I Am
Content is the fuel that makes social media run. Whether it’s a 140 character tweet, a video clip or a photo — content is at the center of the social universe. Moreover, content with context is the holy grail. Geo-location provides instant context to the content we create and share because remember — social is all about me, what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, etc.
Now let’s think about this a little differently. Let’s think about this eco-system from the perspective of someone that needs to find information rather than share information… Here is a scenario:
I was recently in Amsterdam for 3 days of client meetings. I landed a day early to adjust to the time change and get settled in, which gave me a free afternoon to explore and wander. As I headed out of the hotel I had a few choices:
- Ask the concierge what I should do or where I should go.
- Open google maps and search for some points of interest.
- Or…. You guessed it. “Check-In” to my hotel on foursquare and access real-time information about my current surroundings.
Here is the hypothesis. As adoption rates continue to increase across mobile and location-based platforms like Facebook Places and FourSquare, hopefully the quality of real time information improves also. This means that in the future FourSquare could become the front door to the mobile web just like Google became the front door to the desktop web. When I’m at my desk, I search to find information in the digital world. When I’m on the go, I “check in” to access information about the physical world. Social lives right in between the two.
Social is what connects my physical world to my digital world. “Checking in” is the digital representation of “showing up” — it’s how your digital self knows where you are.
Think about it. We have all seen movies like Terminator. Where a the creature or robot from the future (good or evil) has a built-in computer embedded with some augmented reality view of the world. What does that computer do? It provides relevant (and real time) information based on where the creature is and what it is doing.
If FourSquare can unlock delivering users relevant information, connecting them to their social graph and providing context to the content they create — then they could indeed become the future front door to mobile — then we will all care about FourSquare.
Read More10 Reasons Brands Need a Social Media AOR
Is 2011 the Year of the Social Media AOR?
There is no doubt social media is here to stay. Anyone who still says that social is a flash in the pan (and yes, there are people are still saying it) must be living on a different planet. So now that social has crossed the chasm, do brands need a dedicated social media agency?
My answer, even if I am slightly biased, is unequivocally yes.
Brands need a social media AOR because today a brand is shaped more by what their consumers say than what the brand tells them. And because social media cannot be treated as an afterthought, it needs to be integrated into an overall marketing plan. We live in a social world. Consumers are looking for human connections with the brands they buy. Consumers want to be co-creators with brands. And consumers are looking closer at the role brands play in society.
Additionally, if you look at the perception gap between what brands think and what consumers think about the role of social media – the disconnect speaks volumes. This study was conducted by IBM and shows how far apart brands actually are in understanding what consumers are looking for out of a relationship with them.
The bottom line: This is the first time in history that Advertising is talking back. Which means brands (and their agencies) can’t look at consumers the same way in social media as they do in other media. Not to mention, the growing importance and complexity of social media requires ongoing stewardship in a medium that is “always on.”
So, here is 10 reasons why Brands Need a Social Media AOR:
- Social media is a specialty. It requires specific expertise and skill traditional agencies don’t have. You would not ask your media buyer to write your press release or your Publicist to write ad copy.
- Traditional marketing is about interruption. Social media is about invitation. It’s about a two-way dialogue. It’s about creating experiences. It takes a different mentality.
- You can’t adapt advertising messaging for social media. Advertising is about selling and telling. Social media is about storytelling, engagement and socialization.
- Social is about creating audiences and which is different than traditional “targeting” of consumers. It’s about thinking like a publisher, not a marketer.
- Developing content platforms are fundamentally different from ad messaging. Social media is like advertising in reverse. It would require traditional marketers to unlearn years of engrained behavior.
- If you build a community, you need to engage with your audience on an on-going basis. It’s a living breathing entity that needs nurturing. Traditional marketers are not trained and skilled understanding the dynamics of engagement.
- Social media content has to be created with distribution of content and syndication strategies in hand.
- Social impacts everything: from awareness to advocacy to sales and marketing to customer service.
- A dedicated social media agency has social media as part of their DNA. It’s not taking people who happen to be on Facebook and Twitter and dubbing them the new social media department.
- Social media needs to be scalable. While many agencies can handle social media campaigns, few can handle scalability.
About Me
Proud father, devoted husband, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Big Fuel, a full-service marketing and communications company based in New York that takes brands from Content To Commerce.
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