Social media: the medium and the message

Watching yet another presentation from yet another social media expert I'm suddenly overcome by a wave of...something. Is it anger? Well yes, in part. Frankly I'm fed up of the consensus being peddled by people who have set themselves up to profit from these things that if I don't get with the programme where social media is concerned my entire business and possibly my entire life, is going to go down the pan. Is it frustration? Yes, it's that, too. I'm an active user of facebook, I dabble on twitter, I'm familiar with youtube and I spent every waking hour of my professional life between 1998 and 2005 involved in creating business opportunity from new technology. I'm no slouch, but I'm beginning to get confused by it all and that's a bit frustrating. But no, what it is more than anything else is clarity.

The medium has become the message. Marketing managers are desperately scrabbling around trying to work out what on earth to do about social media and they're being egged on by anyone they talk to until it sits head and shoulders above everything else at the top of their agenda. But let's strip this thing back to basics shall we? Social media is just that. Media. Not message. Channel, not content. Sure, it's allowing more people to create, share and respond to content than they could do previously, but it's just a faciliator for something else. As a marketing manager should I be bothered about it? Certainly I should be aware of it. Certainly I should make use of it where I understand it. Certainly it should play a part in what I do. But if I was looking for growth where none existed and had limted funds to find it (sound familiar?) it's not where I'd be putting my attention.

Social media platforms faciliate communication between people in a way which means that billions more 'conversations' are happening today than used to happen the day before they were invented. Billions. The question I have, at least where business is concerned,  is this: are there billions more things to talk about? If there aren't people are just talking. Should I spend my time getting involved in their conversations, trying to make sure that I'm learning from everything they're saying about me, that my company is being represented fairly by all of them and that they know everything about what I have to offer them? Or would I be better creating things for them to talk about? I  know my answer to that.

The point is this: if your business isn't growing as fast as you want it to then social media is unlikely to hold the answers. Sure, it might be a useful way to hear what other people think you should be doing, but where are your own ideas? What do you, and all the clever people you've assembled around you (who know your industry, your company and your customers better than anyone else) think you should do? I've become a bit irritated by the reverence with which people have been talking about Steve Jobs in recent months but there's no denying that the former head of Apple was supremely good at one thing: making people want stuff. And social media platforms were full to bursting with praise for him, his company and his products. Why? I'll tell one thing for nothing: it wasn't to do with his social media strategy.