Drawing the line on social media

Posted On: September 1, 2009
Posted In: Social Media, digital video
Comments: No Responses

Written by: Stephen Collins from acidlabs

My views on social media — its power to con­nect and bring peo­ple closer, to empower par­tic­i­pa­tion, to give voice — are well known. Equally well known are my views on using social media as a mar­ket­ing tool and that I con­sider many mar­ket­ing efforts using social media to be short­sighted at best, rarely con­sid­er­ing the long view and the value such efforts could bring to brands if only long term strat­egy rather than short term cam­paigns were the goal.

I’ve been work­ing with stu­dio Trans­fer and medi­asauce to put together a reel show­cas­ing our views and the views of real peo­ple — peo­ple who don’t work in or with social media, but sim­ply use it to add some­thing to their lives.

Not espe­cially sci­en­tific, we con­ducted vox pops around Syd­ney mar­kets over a few week­ends (there’s a lot of footage not in the final cut) to see what reg­u­lar folks thought social media was, how they used it and what cre­dence they gave mar­ket­ing mes­sages in social media.

What we found out should make the social media mar­keters give pause.Far from absorb­ing social media mar­ket­ing mes­sages, peo­ple are con­nect­ing with each other, build­ing trust net­works, and are quite sophis­ti­cated in their use pat­terns both for busi­ness and per­sonal use. As for mar­ket­ing mes­sages, they care lit­tle for delib­er­ate mar­ket­ing, rather, they turn to those they trust for recommendations.

Take a look.