Why do you think they call it Social Media?
Last night I found myself at a meeting of the Social Media Club's Utah Valley chapter (http://smcuv.org/). For those who know me that probably seems a little out of the ordinary. I am not usually the guy who goes to these types of things, mostly for the fear that a MLM pitch might break out. But last night I picked up a couple tidbits, and had some tasty buffalo-chicken stuffed French bread.
For me the real benefit of these kinds of events comes in the thinking that I get done afterward. Same goes for when I read a good article in Wired, or stumble upon some cool little nugget online. Call it "expanding my paradigm" if you want to be a tool about it, but basically these kind of experiences get me out of my rut. So social media was on my brain while at a meeting this morning. I work for a college and the last 6 months I have been on a committee that puts on an annual symposium concerning Civil Rights and Martin Luther King. It is a good cause so I volunteer my time and my talents (mostly graphic design stuff). This morning we had our postmortem where we talked about what we did right and what we did wrong. As so often happens when you get a bunch of old guard academics together they started talking about Facebook and Twitter and how we should have used social media to drum up interest in the symposium. Academics know that these tools are powerful for two reasons: 1. They can't keep their students off of it during class. 2. Everything they read tells them that "this is important...this means something". But they don't know what it is and they sure as hell don't know how to use it. So when clueless people get around to confronting the whole Facebook/Twitter thing they tend to treat it like traditional media. After spending 10 minutes saying that posters and flyers get lost in the noise, they suggest doing things like blast e-mails and fan pages and spam tweets. It is like they want a whole new way to have their message ignored. I explained briefly that the power of social media is not in how it approaches mass communication, but in how it approaches interpersonal communication. If social media is treated like traditional mass media it becomes noise. Messages need to be personalized. So let's look at our case, where the problem is getting students and faculty interested enough in our symposium to actually participate. In the past our attempts at solutions have been flyers, printed invitations, posters and the campus LCD screen network. These physical manifestations of our message are important and they do get noticed. To eliminate them completely would be a mistake. But the main problem with these messages is that they are not personalized. And because the nature of how they are produced they can never be personalized. Attempts at PR or advertising using social media often fall into a similar trap. An impersonal message gets spammed out to everyone on a friend list and somehow we feel all Web 2.0. Our friend list becomes a junk mailing list, and the message gets treated the same way, maybe even worse because this crap has come from a "friend". If we consider these people friends we should treat them as such. When we are looking for participation, for someone to buy into our idea, we need to make that invitation about them. What are they going to get out of it? In the example of our symposium, imagine a student getting a Facebook message from a professor that personally invites them to join the event. As a friend we know what they are interested in (and if not their profile pretty much spells it out) and we can tailor our message to them. "I thought you might be interested in this session...I know you are looking for vita material for grad school...I think this is a great way to share your unique perspective." This means more work, more interaction, and more willingness to accept the fact that some people you know and like simply won't give a rat's ass about what you are doing. These messages shouldn't go out to everyone. Be selective, be personal. And damn it...be social.
