Understand your audience, develop relationships, engage your community, deepen the conversation.
These are such simple precepts and yet what I am quickly discovering through my work is that the most creative aspect of social media is in achieving these relatively straight-forward goals.
No matter what you do, what service your business offers, or what kind of product you sell, you have a community and an audience and a customer base. The hard part and the one that requires true creativity to achieve, is in figuring out what will and won’t work in your given community. Every community has its protocols, its mannerisms and a distinct vocabulary. The best thing about working with small business owners is slowly guiding them toward the realization that they already know their community, they are familiar with its vocabulary, they know who is influential and why. They know why their competitors have either failed or succeeded.
The counter-intuitive aspect in all of this is that when I first start working with clients, they expect me to have the expertise that they themselves possess. It then becomes my task to get their knowledge out of them, combine it with my skills, prod and pry and suggest, until we have our strategy.
I thought of all this because a minor fracas caught my attention this morning,. From The Future Buzz:
The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded it to A-list technology blog Techdirt. Mike Masnick been doing a great job of covering the entertainment industry’s (rather entertaining) ongoing misunderstanding of this whole social web thing, so I’m pleased to see himshare the story with his community to continue that dialog (and maybe, just maybe help them – although they haven’t been listening so far).
Finally, Adam Singer, the blogger in question: wrote this suggestion to Warner Brothers:
Indeed. Maybe it’s time for the entertainment industry to stop fighting the future at every turn and work on understanding their audience and developing relationships instead of treating us like numbers.
The problem is that creativity cannot be scaled throughout a large corporation. It happens in small groups and without warning. All you can do is set the right conditions for it and have patience. But I think Adam, although he is right on the money, is missing something in his suggestions for Warner Brothers, and the entertainment industry. They did engage their audience, or what they felt was their audience. They just did it without a lick of creativity.
And now that I recognize how hard it is to break the creative mold, I feel a bit more sympathetic of major industry’s continuing inability to achieve what once appeared as the most simple and common sense goals.
Image courtesy of Aidan O’Sullivan on Flickr
