Every week we are inundated with webinars, seminars and Social Tech Gurus explaing to us and other marketers how to ‘manage’ Social Tech.
We are taught and reteach, reinterpret and manage online strategies for Social Web Tech and other forms of online communication. Whilst some online properties, such as html-emails, can be managed as one would any traditional strategy, are we really understanding and using Social Tech properly? In essence, is applying 50-year-old ideas about ROI really the way to engage with Social Tech?
I’m not going to call it ‘New Media’ because it is anything but new. Each week new apps and strategies appear, but they are all fundamentally based on a 20-year old internet platform and a 20-year-old inclusion strategy originally described by Tom Peters – “design (or social engagement) is the new currency”.
The fact that there are seminars on understanding and managing online properties highlights the very real fact that the majority of marketers do not understand how the media they are working in actually works, how it impacts on their clients and potential clients and how this affects the brand.
Traditional agencies are finally waking up to the fact that by ‘effectively managing damage control’ online, through public responses and platforms such as Hello Peter, highlight the fact that, instead of enabling brands and consumers to become more transparent, agencies are finding ways to make non-transparent brands ‘appear’ transparent, real and personal to millions of customers all at once.
Is this not just a return, using a new platform, to the snake oil salesmen of the gold rush? How are we, as our own brands, marketers, advertisers and consumers going to change this, how are we going to ensure that the possibility of real engagement takes place, and is not confined to the Tweet- and Post-intern sitting in a room with a standard list of responses, an iPad and a latte?
Another shift in engagement needs to occur, a real, one-to-one, localised media strategy for online, for Social Tech, for each brand. Without local engagement on a global scale, we are doomed to repeat the failures of the past, this time however, “Dear Sir” will be replaced with Dear “insert your Avatar here”.
