Yet again, social media is not about any tool or platform
It’s an argument that never seems to die, and only gains strength when the next hot platform or tool becomes the darling of the social media world. So let’s shoot it down again:
Social media is not about Twitter. It’s bigger than Facebook. There’s more to it than blogging, YouTube, LinkedIn, or [insert platform du jour here].
Mitch Joel and Joe Jaffe brought this one up during the most recent Jaffe Juice podcast, in response to the “do you tweet?” challenge to traditional ad agencies from the CMO of JetBlue, Marty St. George:
The tweet itself isn’t really the issue – it was rather innocuous and kind of funny, when you get down to it. Especially when you look imagine the key biz dev guys at some of the big shops scrambling their team to “follow him! follow him! For the love of God, at least throw the man an @!”
But Joe and Mitch used the tweet to bring up a larger, and valid point: whether an agency is on, and monitoring, Twitter isn’t really a valid litmus test for their digital savvy. Yes, in this day and age it’s probably dumb of them not to, but it shouldn’t be a make or break test. Why?
Because as I said above, social media isn’t about one platform or tool. It’s about developing a certain mindset and understanding about how the way brands interact with their customers (and critics) has fundamentally changed. How people want to be part of a brand, to define, to make it their own, and not just be talked at. like in the golden years of the traditional agency.
Twitter is only four years old, about the same length of time that Facebook has been open to the world beyond college students. YouTube is all of five years old. Five. They may die any day now for all we know. Twitter could pull a Friendfeed, get bought up, cashed out, and ignored into oblivion despite the howling protests of its passionate users. A year from now something currently seeking seed funding could be doing to Facebook what it did to MySpace (and Friendster).
The tools will change, the platforms will evolve. No “are you using this tool or that one” litmus test should hold any real weight when determining the social media intelligence of your agencies. It’s about the mindset and the fundamental understanding of the new ways of doing business – that’s what you should look for in your agencies, those attributes that will survive the inevitable platform transitions that will make us all look back fondly at our cute Twitter addictions.
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