Due to a hectic couple of weeks, I haven’t been updating this blog as much as I would like. I did however take some time out to attend Figaro Digital’s social media summit last week, which I did find enlightening, though perhaps for the wrong reasons.
Rather than write too much in detail, I felt that the problem faced by social media, was one that it will have difficulty getting over. Like every new sector, there appears to be a compulsion to put it in a box and analyse it seperately from what else is out in the market.
There was a great deal of talk about the need to listen to an audience and engaging with it, well I had sort of hoped that’s how customer services and marketing had been operating for years. There was also a lot of discussion about digital natives (this being this who’d grown up in a social media environment) and immigrants (those of us who are older but use digital.)
One of the differences highlighted was the use of email, with digital natives preferring to use services like Facebook etc to message rather than email. In fact teenagers would quite often only use email when looking to communicate with those in an older age group.
Is this the death of email then, will only us doddery fudder dudders still be using it in 10 years time, when Gmail will seem as antiquated as the franking machine? My guess is no, partly because email and communicating through social messaging are both ways of communicating and when you’re younger you tend to communicate only with your social peers.
When you’re older, the people you need to communicate with become a more diverse group. When I was younger for instance I only used the phone to talk with my friends or family, basically because I had to no need or wish to go out of that circle.
Anyway after that aside, it appears to me that social media whilst being a tool still very much in development is one that is great at doing a number of things. First naturally building a virtual network of friends and contacts, secondly developing an online persona and thirdly a way of transmitting information quickly to that group.
Social and business networks have existed for a very long period of time, today’s platforms make it easier to identify and maintain these but in essence are a development of an existing form. The difference though now is the speed and level of interaction.
How these can be tapped into commercially though remains a grey area, and how to measure the return goes from grey to near dark. My feeling is that there isn’t just one solution to working with social media or media in general, what is successful for one brand or product cannot and should not simply be replicated for other promotions.
Managing a reputation is just as important if your Nike or the local chippy, how you do it though varies immensely, and engagement with social media in a variety of forms will become standard. The measurement of success, I think will remain difficult. The consequences of failure though could be devastating.

Rob, One.