Social Media Experts and REBT;
How do you stun 300+ Social Media Experts? Ask them what 'Social Media' is.
Last month I attended the April Social Media Club Sydney meeting not knowing what to expect, and left feeling energised and ready to take on the world with Social Media. Ironically the feeling of ability was reassured by Adam Ferrier and the Fake Senator Conroy;not any of the social media experts.
Adam Ferrier's approach;loosely paraphrased as 'ou're all morons, it's just the internet' was pure brilliance and removed the shroud of confusion for me as I realised that Social Media websites like Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite et al are really just a rehash of older aspects of the internet. It also dawned on me that most Social Media Experts are living largely in an emotionally unstable and irrational world.
Fiercely people at the event were asking questions through the #smcsyd hashtag, but the audience remained dumbfounded in the plausibility of using their actual voice to ask a question. I came to the conclusion that;
- People voice their opinions on Twitter for the same reason people have always voiced their opinion on the Internet
- There is a level of fairytale-ism to the internet that empowers users to voice their opinion with a sense of removal and detachment
The farce of Social Media expertise was never more profoundly stated than when Leslie Nassar asked the audience 'What is Social Media?'. The silence was overwhelmingly satisfying.
Comments
I can't agree with all you're saying. I agree there's alot of hype, too much, and some of it by "experts" that have no qualifications, little experience, and even less actual knowledge. But... this idea that people will vent unchecked online needs more exploration. I noticed it too when I went to an smcsyd event and was quite offended by some of the trash talk on twitter by so called professionals in the field. People who vent online in random places in random ways are often engaging in what's known as "disinhibited behaviour"... it's usually associated with a lack of established identity and that's NOT what social networks are about. When used constructively, they're built on identity, which is established through interaction, the development of trust and respectability amongst other things.
There's so much more to it than just getting the "old" internet and putting new labels on it (although I know the principles are far from new), so please don't think all people who have built a living around social networking are hacks.
Thanks Laurel
Whilst I can appreciate that Social Media is—for the most part—created by the masses, I still find it hard to believe that it was created for the masses.
Having worked on social media campaigns I have come to the conclusion that in order to have a successful social media campaign you need to;
Offer consumers something of reasonable value for them to participate (otherwise they're not interested)
Generate a story with credibility of a Guiness World Record
It seems that the most popular 'viral' campaigns were fakes, as people perhaps wanted to believe that they were true?
In todays society true love is reportedly had to come by, so romanticism in fairytale context worked well, as did the inner desire to be rebellious.
Is social media really something new, or just a new way of appealing to existing senses of desire and hope.
After all, isn't that what Jesus was all about? I'd wager he is the viral campaign.
Grant
Traditional & Interactive/new media is created by agencies for engagement with clients one-on-one, one way channel.
Social media is member created content to be shared by other members of a social network, usually multi-channel.
Social network marketing is the attempt by crappy agencies to inflict bad viral campaigns on the community in the vain hope they will pass them around and be fooled by 'em.
how'd I do?
LMAO @ Jesus is the Viral Campaign.
Awesome.
I'm totally using that.
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