An email advertisement for a virtual business summit in the spring of 2011 promised a number of well-known social media gurus in attendance and contained the following key message:
“They’ll share how they use social media to beat the competition!”
Which begs the question of what function social media is meant to have in business today.
While earthquake-ravaged Facebook users in Japan were posting messages assuring family members of their safety and the rest of the world combed through terabytes of online content to educate themselves in all manner of concepts from basic plate tectonics to nuclear fission, are those whose livelihood comes from the digital world really only worried about beating the competition?
If a good ad sets out to speak to the very basic need of its consumers, then this ad copy would indicate that there is a camp in business that believes their role in online communities is entirely about winning the attention/impressions/click-throughs of their audience. For this camp, social networks are a world of transactions, and social media is a new, exciting, highly measurable and potentially very lucrative new storefront.
And yet, at the risk of bursting some bubbles, consider the following:
- It’s not your storefront: Online communities belong to the community, if Facebook or Twitter got hit by a proverbial bus, guess what? The community will build a new one.
- When in Rome: If you’re selling something, remember you’re at worst an awkward door-to-door salesperson and at best, a guest in someone else’s home. So, take a cue from your hosts: Watch what they do, listen to what they say and then, join the conversation and see what comes. In other words; Don’t transact, engage.
- Value: Stop worrying so much about ‘winning’ and ‘beating’ your competition. In fact, stop thinking about your competition altogether and start obsessing about your gracious hosts, and what you value you are bringing to them.
In the words of the guy who declared in 1997 that the future would be about relationships not transactions (Saatchi & Saatchi CEO, Kevin Roberts), businesses looking to succeed within the communities living and thriving on social networks would do well to have a good answer to the single most important question consumers have today:
“How will you improve my life?”
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