Social Media is social

Sounds obvious but the point is Facebook and Twitter are about socialising and not business, and it can be very frustrating for a marketer not to be able to harness the enormous potential of social media.

The thing is that it’s people that control the new media, not moguls or advertisers or editors with agendas. People make of social media what they want and it’s generally acknowledged that what they don’t want is to be sold to all the time.

There are a few examples of businesses making money on Twitter (most famously Dell computers) but maybe they are freaks. A commenter on my earlier blog about Ministry of Sound pointed out that MOS’s large online following is not down to marketing genius but the appropriateness of the brand for that audience.

When you think of brands that have big social media followings, they appeal to the right demographic, whether it’s Ministry of Sound, The Tate or Stephen Fry (I bet the crossover between Him and People Who Like Twitter is huge).

All the marketers have done is provide an environment in which people can play. That can be done well or badly of course but just doing it well won’t be enough. Social media isn’t going to work for everyone.

Again, the point is that it’s people who are determining usage and not clever advertising or marketing types. Build it and they will come (but only if they want to).

UPDATE: A couple of weeks after I posted this brief blog, the great Royal Opera House/Intermezzo fiasco occurred. In the blog, I talked about the difficulty for companies to control the positive aspects of social media but this incident showed how out of control it can get when things go wrong. There was probably an element of bandwagon-jumping in the outpouring on Twitter and on the original blog (people exercising existing agendas about the ROH or the art form) but there was undoubtedly a genuine response from many people concerned about the issues raised. It was an important lesson in how social media works and it should be heartening to the ROH that there are so many people passionate about what they do. Just need to get it right next time.