The Future Buzz | Media, Marketing, PR

I’ve made it no secret how much of a fan I am of Digg and Reddit and how much there is we can learn from these networks. In terms of horizontal sharing communities, they’re especially interesting because the entire community gathers around the same content. What this creates is a tribal culture due to the normalized experience everyone has. Whether I’m into business or technology, I’ll see all the stories that go popular if I’m subscribed to Digg’s main feed. Reddit is not exactly like this due to subreddits, but similar in that much of the community is subscribed to the larger feeds.

Visualization of a Facebook fan page I created for a brand eclipsing 6-figure fans between April-May in 2009 (it has since grown to +700,000 fans).

Platform-specific communities can be a challenge to grow. It’s daunting because you’re probably already growing a voice for your brand on something like a self-hosted blog. But if you can spark rapid growth in a network external of your own, it can be a consistent organic referral source to the places you’re really interested in funneling traffic. Essentially, it’s a valuable outpost.

Social media is not new. At this point, you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer (all marketers should understand social media by now). The term – once meaningful – has been overused to the point it has become nothing more than a buzzword in the hands of most. Social is simply what the web does, and as a net native who has watched the abuse of the term social media over the years, I’ve slowly become adverse to its use at all.

But unfortunately we have to use it. Too many businesses and clients are enamored with it, or perhaps feel if they don’t start throwing it around they will be viewed as passé.

You have to love the wiki definition for buzzword:

A buzzword is a term of art or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context by nonspecialists who use the term vaguely or imprecisely. Labelling a term a “buzzword” often perjoratively implies that it is now used pretentiously and inappropriately by individuals with little understanding of its actual meaning who are most interested in impressing others by making their discourse sound more esoteric, obscure, and technical than it otherwise would be.

This definition perfectly describes the largest buzzword of 2009 and 2010: social media.

Recently, Stephen Baker at Business Week wrote an article titled Beware Social Media Snake Oil. However, the article does not deliver on the headline and instead wanders aimlessly throughout several disparate points without delivering much of a punch. Let’s dig into it:

As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations.

While the business digital divide – at least in the marketing and media industries – feels to be closing, there’s another rift less discussed: a divide between those with digital influence/share of voice and those without. And it’s a rift that grows wider daily.

Many businesses and individuals who embraced content marketing years ago are seeing strong returns and are way ahead of those starting today. I started pondering why this is and jotted down the following list:

Everyone is buzzing about social media marketing. You can’t turn your head without hearing about it at a conference. Marketing and PR professionals are either engaged today or thinking about how to engage tomorrow. Everyone is suddenly claiming expert status (by the way: you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer).

In Think Twice: Harnessing The Power of Counterintution, Michael J. Mauboussin postulates that a diverse crowd will always predict more accurately than the average person in the crowd.

He takes social scientist Scott Page’s diversity prediction theorem (collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity) a step further to identify the three conditions which must be in place to know when crowds will predict well: diversity, aggregation and incentives:

Face facts: social media isn’t new anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been new for a long time.

We’ve been socializing on the web for well over a decade – long before Twitter, Facebook and the glorification of monolithic walled gardens, which are nothing more than modern versions of AOL and prodigy with bells and whistles.

If you think the social web is new, you’re already far late to the party. And if you are late, the worst thing you can do for your brand or yourself is to flat out ignore or brush off a form of communication that an entire generation already sees as “invisible.”

Social media comments are the new trackbacks.

Enabled by a slew of tools, there is an increasing trend of bloggers aggregating comments about their content from around the web right on their blog. In theory, this is a nice idea – bringing together bits of conversations in one spot – under the original content.