The Rise Of Anti-Social Behaviour

At the beginning of last year, I helped put together an event at NESTA, where I detected for the first time an undercurrent of suspicion about social media and particularly social media consultants.  I remember the room recoiling at the suggestion that anyone in attendance was a social media advisor.  Perish the thought!  And again, at a bash I helped out with at the IPA, there was plenty of good discussion about social media.  However, also the same concerns.  As illustrated by this film - 'The Social Media Guru'.  Well worth a quick viewing if you haven’t already.  Since then, Business Week has advised wariness about ‘social media snake oil’, reporting that, ‘Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes.  Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel : Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos.’  Which has led one or two social media consultants to defend their practices as both professional and good value.  So why is this?  Is it just a case of caveat emptor applying to a new market as much as any other?  Or a natural backlash against the relentless hype of new social widgets and the rise of Facebook - the social world’s own 800-pound gorilla?  Personally, I wonder if this suspicion is because it’s not yet clear what role social media will have in the broader communications industry - particularly for brands.  At that IPA evening, the interesting part of the chit-chat, for me at least, was exactly on this issue.  Are we talking interesting new...

...tactics or major media sea-change?  Perhaps it’s just too soon to say.

However, I wonder if social media - in itself - is not the really big shift at all.  The InterWeb has always been inherently ‘social’, albeit in geekier forms than today’s slick networks.  It’s pretty much the whole point of widely available and accessible communications tools - from Usenet to Facebook groups.  What else were people going to do with them, other than ‘socialise’?  And beyond the web, we are all social animals, all of the time, every day of our lives.  As the Social Media Guru says, ‘It’s social media baby, you do it yourself!’

Maybe the real grit is not about social media joining the mainstream but the shift of mainstream media onto web-based IP platforms and other digital channels, where social behaviour is the driving force.  The music industry is finally beginning to accept what their customers want in these new environments.  The newspaper industry is trying its best to get there.  And TV is on the way.  All of them are leaping (or being dragged by creaking analogue economics) onto IP platforms that make no distinction between content.  No peak time schedules.  Just digital systems responding to the whims of people-powered networks, driving change with their clickstreams and communities.

This mega-shift means the relevant issues today are no longer just about the emergence of online social platforms, but the workings of this new media ecosystem.  For instance, what will be the effects of location-driven services, new behavioural patterns, the share-and-compare economy, virtual currencies, more dynamic markets, powerful groovyware, open spectrum, innovative campaigning styles, new types of data availability, shifting revenues and new commercial opportunities.  None of which could really be categorised as just 'social'.

At Collaborate Marketing, we call this joined-up world the networked media environment. While social systems are driving a lot of change, we believe they are only one aspect of the kaleidoscope of amazing experiences the web will deliver as the world’s media makes the leap across the IP divide.