Written by: Stephen Collins from acidlabs

Mostly.

EDIT: And when I say “mostly”, I mean marketing ultimately focused on getting people to buy stuff. Not on changing opinion, not on awareness. It’s a deliberately narrow definition for the purposes of this post.

I’m going to try to be concise as I put this out there for your amusement. I say this as I’m inclined to go off on a ranty diatribe about this as I have strong feelings about it. It’s also the position I think I’ll be taking at the second SMC Sydney that I’m part of the panel for next Monday night.

I’ve been working with collaborative projects and communities of common interest for a long time now. In one way, shape or form, I’d hazard about 10 years. In terms of working with and using the tools and classes of software we’re now calling social media – wikis, blogs, social networks, ideas markets, and their various predecessors – I’ve got more than a little experience as a user and implementer of them throughout my career.

Because of this experience, I have well-formed views about what the greatest benefit these tools can offer are. And it’s not in marketing.

Let me start with a a definitive statement.

I’m not anti-marketing. I’m not even anti social media marketing. But collectively the selling component of marketing is possibly the least interesting thing about social media.

In fact, there are some incredibly smart people who work in marketing and really, really understand social media and its benefits. They are trying hard to make a difference. You know who you are (I have my own little list in my head).

But there’s a long way to go before the marketing industry as a whole really gets social media.

I think it’s great that we can measure around community engagement with social media campaigns. However, as someone who’s worked with communities and social software a lot longer than the marketing industry has had its knickers in a twist about it, I find it more than a little amusing that the industry often seems to think that their business is what social media is all about.

Wake up people!

It’s not about how JOO CAN SELL MOAR STUFFZ!!!!!!!

It’s not about eyeballs.

Finding the connectors on Facebook and giving them a video camera and a Summer’s worth of beer does not a connected, nurtured, collaborative community make.

What social media is about is the community. It’s about how much you actually care for them. About how much you connect with them and nurture them. It’s about how much that ties in to your larger, long term business strategy. It’s about innovation and sharing and empowerment and knowledge and building something sustainable over the long term. It’s about people and the way they come together do do something more than they could alone.

And there are few social media marketing campaigns I’ve seen that do much, if any, of that. They scratch around the edges. They say the right words but they have dead eyes.

As a pragmatic Cluetrainer, I get the feeling that most campaigns that seek to incorporate social media wouldn’t know the Cluetrain if it ran up and whacked them upside the head.

Of course, this is all just one person’s view. Your mileage may vary (and I hope it does).

Mostly.