Who's afraid of Social Media?

Recently we gave a presentation discussing the potential marketing of an upcoming product. Alex and me suggested using Social Media to make the step from the phase of early adopters to the mass market. Thought the listeners were quite young people and were aware of social media and its immense power they were quite sceptical, to not say scared. That got me thinking: are people scared of Social Media? And if so: Why? How can we prevent that? What can and should we do about it?

[The Insider] Freunde des Mauerpark e.V.

The Mauerpark in Berlin (between Pankow and Wedding) isn't a park as all the others. When you look at it during weekdays it looks like an old, dry fallow land you would never call "park". While on weekends it is overcrowded - feeling more overcrowded than alexander platz - and filled with all kinds of artists; there are bands playing, people dancing, there is open air karaoke and a fleemarket every sunday. It is a really special place.

And like every special place the Mauerpark needs people who take care of it. One society of 25 volunteers taking care of the Mauerpark is the "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." ("Society of friends of the Mauerpark") who are trying to establish the park as a constant in Berlin, its culture scene and tourism. So when they thought about relaunching their webpage last year it was decided to get off the path of a "normal society webpage". The people behind "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." wanted a website transferring all facets of the Mauerpark - they decided to go "social media". We had the great opportunity to talk to Alexander Puell from dfacts.de, the designer of the concept, the creator of the page (software wise) and the one behind most of the social media involvement of the foundation. And, boy, did we learn a lot!

The End of Top-Down Control

I'll keep it short today, I promise.
I just want to show a really good TED-Talk about how Social Media is changing the way people communicate and participate in things politicians and also companies do. This TED-Talk was held by Clay Shirky in June 2009.

If companies were real people

most of them would be in therapy by now. I mean seriously, they only care about themselves and act only to get their drugs (theirs is called "profit"): they are ignorant, betray, use people and lie straight in their faces. Unless they need you for their goals they won't even acknowledge your existence. But if they do they only care as much as they need to for their goal: as soon as they reached it they let you fall like a hot potato.

stay disconnected

This Monday I talked about the Social Media Landscape. In there I mentioned in half sentence that "Most of the Media Sharing Platforms allow similar techniques [as Social Networks] by now but it isn't their main purpose." without explaining myself. What I meant with this are all the ways to follow the updates other do on their accounts. For example you can "subscribe" to a users on flickr and youtube. When ever said user is now uploading new content you'll be informed about this. This allows you to stay connected.

Well, kinda. If you are a member of as many platforms as I am (I counted almost 20 I was able to remember by hard a few month ago, since then it grew) you are not logged into each one permanently, checking or updates all the time. This is why so many of the Media Sharing Platforms allow the users to connect with Facebook or Twitter nowadays. And on first sight that sounds like the long wanted feature we were all missing: connect everything with everything and everyone and all the time.

Social Media ain't any different

A few weeks back we went to a "Social Media Workshop". Although we were not the targeted audience (the others were from companies with way over 1000 employees) and the speaker focussed on classic Internet Marketing, Blogs and SEO a bit too much it left some traces. One sentence that really got stuck was: "Social media ain't any different" and he continued saying that a marketing plan and target audience and all the classic marketing stuff has the same value it had outside social media. Bare with me when I say he is right. Right while being totally wrong.

Let me explain:
Compared to the long history of human communication mass media is a very young phenomenon (some even call it a fluke...) but it reached its limitation and got stuck already. More and more companies are not willing nor able to spend thousands of Euros for some TV- or Print-Campaign. They rather spent way less to do some smart advertising in the internet, targeted to the real audience. The reason why most of them do that is that internet marketing is actually measurable. You can track whether an ad campaign leads to sells or not. It can proof its value and you can make it more efficient.