Social Media Marketing for Business

I've slogged through another offering on the topic of social media, Brown's Social Media Marketing for Business - and I've come to the conclusion that one of the main reasons that commercial organizations don't understand social media is that the people who offer them advice on how to leverage it don't understand it either. But rather than cataloging the various issues, it's likely more useful to focus on what's likely the most valuable bit of information the book offers: people socialized before social media existed.

That's one of the greatest fallacies offered by social media, or anything slapped with a "new" label, is that it causes people to behave in ways that they previously did not, or effected a significant change in existing behavior. The advances that catch on satisfy needs that already exist, or facilitate actions that are already taking place. The advances that require people to change their behaviors seldom gather much steam.

You can argue that technology encourages people to take action by making things easier to do. Because we have airplanes, more people visit foreign countries. They had the ability to do so before, but it was too expensive or inconvenient to bother. Perhaps that was not entirely a bad thing, as crossing an ocean on a steamship gave passengers a bit of time to learn the language and culture of the place they would be visiting, and the expense kept the more embarrassing members of society from giving the rest a bad reputation overseas.

But I digress - and to make hay of the digression, etiquette is often lost as a consequence of technological gain. Those who see social media as a "new" set of behaviors do not recognize that the old rules apply: discretion and consideration are cast aside because they are "old" and have no place in the new way of things. Or so it is assumed by those who venture into the "new" world of social media and, apparently, by those who offer them advice as to how to behave.

Most people recognize that handing out business cards at a social event, bringing a bullhorn to a public park to hawk your wares, interrupting a conversation among people you barely know to tell them about the things you will do for them if they give you some money, and other such behaviors are entirely inappropriate. But these same things are advocated in social media because it is presumed to be different and new and the old rules don't apply.

And it's a bit ironic that in every book about social media, there's at least one chapter and sometimes several about what to do if people don't like you, don't want to be your friend, and warn other people about the things that you've done to offend them, intrude upon them, and take advantage of them. Meanwhile, every other chapter in the book offers advice that will almost certainly lead you to offend, intrude upon, and take advantage of people.

If I didn't know better, I'd be led to believe that the point of these books is to convince firms to do things that will give them a bad reputation so that they will hire the author as a consultant to help them fix the problems that following his advice has created. Sounds like a pretty good racket.