Point well made about bubbles and if you trace the etymology of the word ‘bubble’ back to its first appearance in english with Shakespeare’s Macbeth you discover that it never had a sterling reputation:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Three witches cooking up trouble for Macbeth kinda says it all. Or does it? Krugman’s assertion is true that affinity is used to support arguments that otherwise have no merit whatsoever, but that’s not the case with the ill-termed phenomena of ‘social’ media.

The way I look at it that word ‘social’ is applied to digital media within a business context in an almost ironic way as if to suggest that enterprises can no longer count on cloaking themselves in anonymity behind an opaque pay wall. Forcing grey suited men to be social with their customers seems like a worthy enough goal alone even if (and this is where the irony comes in) it amounts to revealing that many of these corporate honchos are virtual sociopaths with no social skills to speak of.

Okay I admit it, ESPECIALLY if it amounts to . . .

Tyler’s response makes some good points but let’s pause before we cast ALL the proverbial money-changers out of the temple. Brian Solis is, I think, a credible voice apart from the bubble’s usual cast of carpetbaggers. He understands that you can’t market effectively within digital networks of potential customers without the enterprise itself going under fundamental re-structuring (at least culturally). I give him points for the honesty to say that, for most of the big-money marketers out there, social media is a non-starter.

Sure, he makes a few bucks out of telling them that, knowing some of them are always willing to give it the old college try. Disclaimer: I made a good living in the last tech bubble helping archaic institutions that were determined to get on the ‘desktop’ of other businesses. Mostly they were unable to get their heads around it but I learned from all attempts and so did the larger business culture. Brian also does tend to succumb to affinity from time to time when he gets together with others in the game by succumbing to a superficial historicism to justify the consensus on current conditions but that is something we are all guilty of no matter what side of the argument we are on.

For example “You can’t monetize human interaction . . .” is a pithy statement to close on but if I think about it I would counter with, “Oh yeah, but sex (human interaction) definitely sells and with liquor the sale is even quicker.”

Nothing fixes ones attention on the present circumstances like the need to get paid. No doubt most of those working the current bubble view social media as a means to that profitable end. The truth about social media is probably a lot more prescient than present. The corporate cultures that will benefit from a socially open business culture probably don’t exist yet or if they do they were formed recently within the social media sphere and currently exist as some lame offering on Kickstarter that will, at some date in the future, make its contributors (whom the rest of us scoff at) a nice financial return.

Can I get an AMEN on this . . .
http://socialdisruptions.com/psychopaths-robots-and-airheads-corporations-on-social-media/

“In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan

“Yes there are two paths that you can go on but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on”
Led Zeppelin

I’m using the above quote from Marshall McLuhan because the stakes have never been higher from a McLuhanistic perspective although that does not preclude that they can go no higher still. We are in a new cultural ‘cold’ war over a future in which freedoms, both personal and collective, may be redefined to the detriment of one vested interest or another. The current battleground is what we refer to as social media (a.k.a. social computing). The strategic manoeuvres in this war are obscured, which is the nature of cold war, by proxy clashes over various topical issues in the culture (music piracy). If you isolate and deconstruct the patterns in these clashes I think it will lead you to conclude that the primary foes are, on one hand, corporatism and on the other hand, humanism.

Humanism and Corporatism are not mutually exclusive concepts, but in the modernist interplay of institutionalized philosophies attempting to secure a future for the values they represent, toes will inevitably get stepped on. In this case it has gone beyond minor conflict into near-pitched battle because of the emergence and dominance of the new medium of networked digital technology and its destabilizing effect on social truisms like privacy and intellectual property. I hope it is not too hyperbolic to use the 20th century analogy of nuclear weapons and their effect on global politics.

“Now wait a minute Buster,” you might exclaim, “Are you trying to tie the sharing of family photos in Facebook with a concept as elusive as the extension of human consciousness? Are you saying that in effect the nature of human thought itself could be diminished or in some way constrained by the digital marketplace that attempts to promote goods and services to those who build personal relationships on line?!”

To summarize, we seem to have to choose a future where we can expect capitalism to evolve to a model of a less solipsist and self-centred consumer who sees, through a connected world, that his or her choices have an effect, OR else a future where consumers CONTINUE to become the playthings of corporatism as we saw with the housing bubble. I admit that there is a lot of work to do to prove such a hypotheses and there are some powerful interests (like Justice Scalia and the people behind Citizen’s United) who would prefer the latter option to the former. So those of us who agree that there is a cultural cold war going on had better get started making people aware.

Well, I think it’s time for me to respond. Thank you everyone for your well-reasoned comments. I’m pleased that Maurice brought up Brian Solis and McLuhan and that Anthony mentioned Bruce Schneier. And Andrew joins the fray with his firsthand experience of working in social media.

Does Facebook really make you feel closer to people?linkedin.com/today/post/art…

— Brian Solis (@briansolis) January 21, 2013

I saw this tweet from Brian Solis, and I responded to it with a question – what does “closer” and “people” mean in the digital space? Obviously, from an anthropological POV, we humans want to remain in touch with each other as we are social animals. Dunbar’s number reminds us that cognitively we are capable of only “staying in touch” with up to 150 people before things drop off the social cliff as it were. Today, technology simply shortens the distance between us – it began with the telegram and the telephone, then the cell phone and now the Internet.

So a question to you all – can Facebook ever make its users “closer?”

Andrew, I will respond to your comment a little later.

Just a quick follow up to answer your question Dave. We are both closer and farther apart through digital connections because we construe our isolation as mostly psychological where as in previous human history isolation was perceived as geographical and cultural.

Technology has consigned those concepts to oblivion. Now we have to deal with the bizarre notion that ‘common ground’ has become digitized and therefore there is less inclination than ever to match up our values to the people in our immediate physical presence.

To put it succinctly, individualism and tribalism have merged together into a society where one’s identity can be aligned with multiple tribes. This expands unified identity but shrinks individual identity.

Andrew,

Sorry for the delay in responding. You very kindly praise me for being “brave” and for standing against “the just for the sake of it” idea of social media, but I don’t deserve the honor. I am neither brave nor standing against what you say. My stance is against the SMM cohort and their bubble.

You offer a full-throated defense of social media marketing from the perspective of one who works at doing just that, so it is you that is brave here. I’m afraid that your personal experience in social media marketing has actually made you biased toward it – which is the very thing I wrote about. You are clearly passionate when say you “..love brands on social media for the same reason that I love great customer service reps instead of bots,” yet I find that an odd comparison as it’s not exactly apples to apples, for e.g. when I see brand tweets on Twitter I see nothing but bad bot prose infected with dangling modifiers. I agree that good social web practice is to provide timely responses to user issues for, but if you are going to be hanging on the phone with American Airlines chugging your way through the auto-response talking bot then I’d presume that falls well outside social media – until that person flames AA in Twitter or FB.

I’m also concerned that the bulk of your comment is a subliminal defense of Facebook when you mention deals and 1:1 relationships. It’s a presumption that all social web users are even interested in having a “relationship” with a brand, and again, that’s the gist of this post, that social media marketing reinforces social media marketing – not on behalf of the user but on behalf of the brand. I enjoy 1:1 twitter conversations with people, I don’t have 1:1 conversations with brands.

Overall brand strategy requires a digital strategy and within that strategy the use of social platforms can be baked into the brand channel plan to reach a brand’s customers.

Let me finish on that word strategy, a term that is often confused and even conflated with tactics. You say it’s fair of me to “attack poor examples of strategy” but I’m not sure I actually did except perhaps subconsciously. Strategy – a plan for achieving a proscribed outcome, or where an action takes place, through the use of research and insights to achieve a goal.

As for tactics, my friend Justin Spohn once put it this way in a presentation, tactics might be “HTML,” “Twitter” or “yellow and green.”

Thanks for jumping into the fray and commenting here. Discourse always helps.

DA.

Rod,
I’m not sure you mean reappropriated – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation ? Maybe you do, but I am not reclaiming the original instance of DFW’s pithy parable, I am simply referring to it here as an example of how all of us tend to live in bubbles. I’m also repeating it as a soft nudge at the institutions I teach in and work in. You can be rightly critical of the context of use. So be it. But I disagree. I’m also unsure of whether your disdain is toward my use of the parable or your disdain for SMM in general. Either way, the world is a better place I believe, if people look up DFW’s work and read it, even if they found the link to it in my post.

I wrote, “Whether DFW originally got it from or the other two”

I meant to write, “Whether DFW originally got it from McLuhan or the other two scholars”

Hello Dave,

My name is Max and I am currently in J456 with Deb Morrison. I stumbled upon your blog while stumbling through the inter webs. I came upon this quote in your article and was wondering if you could expand a little on this idea:

“The second half is closer to what I’m aiming for, where I paraphrase this line as so – when everyone is right, absolutely right, that social media marketing must be an imperative and an unassailable construct as part of an overall brand strategy.”

Most specifically the last part of “social media marketing must be an imperative and an unassailable construct as part of an overall brand strategy.” Im trying to understand brand strategy and the ideas of brands better! Id love some feed back on my blog posts too if you have time!

Thanks in advance

Go Ducks!

[...] quick post on the back of the one I wrote about social media marketing selling [...]