My wife is the typical Facebook user

Social media is about community, and not the platform. A social media platform or app accelerates a community coming together with a self interest based on mutual benefit.

Yet from my experience, everyone perceives this evolution towards forming online communities differently according to who they perceive to be the typical user of Facebook.

The current social media generation gap among my colleagues generally looks something like this:

• Those that conjure a picture of their teenage children tend to see Facebook as no more relevant to their daily lives as a Playstation.

• Those with older children (post or at university) while not appreciating that social media is becoming ubiquitous, at least see some value in sharing content such as updates and photos.

• Those with children under high school age are most likely to be already users of social media in their own personal, albeit passively.

• Those without children are probably the only people to actually have time to use it and cross multiple channels, probably including gaming and dating.

My typical Facebook user is my wife. Not just because women make up more active users than men, but because she is the best example of using social media to speak with and listen to her community that avidly checks in wherever we go.

The best example of this is using one of her iPhone nappy apps. (Nappies are diapers for my North American chums). When we recently had dinner with another family at the Pizza Express in Rochester, (again for my friends on the west side of the Atlantic, that’s Kent, not up state New York) I was so impressed with the baby changing facilities that she mandated me to post an entry for every other parent visiting the Medway towns and stranded for somewhere to change their baby.

This is community at its best. Sharing something that is good, not simply for our own benefit, but for the community to prosper. We all belong to different communities and therefore find different uses for the medium.

My communities include people I train with, friends I drink with, friends that live too far away to drink with, people I meet to talk about local politics, the people I speak to when I walk the dog (and a further subset that don’t just look at me strange and speak to me back).

It may seem to my colleagues that all this Facebook stuff is just for teenagers to gossip and parents to share photos, however, over the next ten years these tools will become central to how we live and do business, just as email and mobile telephones have.

Whether they are on Facebook or a iPhone apps, the typical social media user by 2020 will be however we percieve ourselves.

Cheap social media makes marketers lazy

Just as I entered a meeting with a colleague and one of the founders of The Social Media Leadership Forum I happened up this article on the daily enews bulletin from Marketing Week.

Let me paraphrase the premise, junior marketers are over using social media because it is perceived as low cost and that finance managers care more about return on investment than cost and are by default encouraging this. We kicked it around and although we had some sympathy for the sentiment, I don’t buy any of it.

So as the charge came from with our profession here is my response. The basis of successful marketing stands, and indeed underpins all successful campaigns. I.e. target messages of a well researched proposition at a target audience you understand and will perceive the value they can extract from your proposition - that it is greater than any alternative.

The channel we choose to use to deliver the messages is informed more by our knowledge of the customer not just the cost of delivering the message. Social, and digital media more generally, are just some of the possible channels. A practicing marketer that ignores all possible ways of effectively engaging their client is lazy full stop. Not just lazy because they are using social media at the expense of the alternatives/compliments.Just an aside to this, one of the largest growth areas for use of social media is a s a second screen to TV activity.

No longer do we have to wait until the next day to have a conversation beside the water cooler about what was on the box – we can share it with our network through Facebook and Twitter as it happens. Link this new trend of dual screens (the TV and your social media device) and we could see a major resurgence in big ticket above the line TV advertising. The pursuit of which is anything but lazy.

Just because it's difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it

A friend told me about an online industry community she had invested her firm's money and time in over the past year. She has worked hard to cajole her colleagues into producing blogs on their areas of expertise, take part in discussion threads and even post videos from conferences and C level executives.

In spite of this effort, she just couldn’t seem to get her business behind the channel. In particular, her firm consistently failed to input to the topics the community were most engaged about as effectively as her competitors.

Despite the success of her company’s competitors had shown in increased engagement and sales, despite the investment already made and the apparent opportunity the growing community presented; A committee of recently appointed managers cancelled the initiative's budget, because changing the way her organisation operated was seen to be 'just too hard.'

I learned early in my career as a marketing manager at one of the largest organisations in the world that just because something was hard to do, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. This wasn’t the mantra of the business, but my line manager. A man in his late thirties that had risen rapidly to run a pan European US$200 million turnover division and was perceived by his peers to have the alchemist's touch. How had he done this, he changed the businesses he ran to be responsive to whatever clients valued. Even if that meant finding new ways of working.

So often in marketing we look to external solutions to achieve our commercial objectives. A different place to advertise, a new event, a bigger or better web site to push our products and services. When in fact, we should simply address the hardest challenge of them all first; Create an effective business that engages in and responds to what our communities are really interested in.

5 things to tell your colleagues that still don’t get social media

1/ It’s active, even if you’re not
Even if you or your business is not actively listening or engaging with your customers in social media, your business, product, industry, advocates, detractors are being talked about. My own firm is talked about with mainly positive and neutral sentiment hundreds of times a month on Twitter alone. Our products and industry is mentioned hundreds of times an hour.

2/ Social media is principally an online representation of what happens in the real world
In the real world we share news, photos of our children, birthday wishes and invitations, just as at work we invite clients to events, talk about products and share results. I appreciate that not everyone we work with has friends or anything interesting to say. For those that do, social media has proven itself as the easiest and most immediate way to share.

3/ What we do online stays online
I am not convinced privacy is dead, but the super injunction nonsense of the past few weeks illustrates that it is probably on its last legs. So be careful, by all means. Contrary to point 2, don’t do everything online that you would do offline, it sticks.

A large part of the success of Linked In is due to its online representation of our CVs (Resumes). Now it is a universal truth, not widely discussed, that everyone’s CVs contain a little fiction. Don’t fall into this trap, social media allows everything to be checked and verified.

4/ If you don’t engage in social media, your competitors will
Social media is by no means ubiquitous, certainly not in the developed world. But it will be. Orkut, a Facebook me too in Brazil has 84% penetration and continues to grow. Similarly renren and 51 in China, Vkontakte in Russia and Bharatstudent in India all have following on a scale that would dwarf the populations of some small European states.

Social media will become a default communications tool for most people under the age of 40 by the time the football World Cup reaches Russia in 2018, especially in the fastest growing economies with the youngest demographics such as the BRIC nations. Corporate websites will become increasingly obsolete as communities interested in a topic or product come together online, with or without your business.

Successful businesses are finding the communities that are interested in their solutions, and listen to the conversation before engaging.

5/ The big numbers aren’t the true story
Facebook is predicted to have a billion users by the end of 2012, and social media will reach 90% penetration of all internet users in 2013. By the summer of 2012, half of all mobile phone users in Europe will use smart phones. In the UK, nearly 26 million adults have Facebook accounts. Of all UK Facebook users, 50% are over 36.

However, the power of social media is isn’t in its scale alone, it is in the quality everyone’s connections. People for time in memorial have asked people they trust before making a purchase, and social media has accelerated this. Amazon understands it, and the travel industry is coming to grips with it through Trip Advisor. Havas Media’s research in 2010 found 62% of UK shoppers consult online communities before buying and 34% have looked at an online review at least once before making a purchase.

Which takes us nicely back to point 1. Social media is active, even if you are not.