Brands and social media

Recently the meetings i have been, revolves around the issue of social media. Everyone seems to talk about putting a social media element to their websites. But wait, hold on, do you really know what you are actually getting into?

Everyone right now is trying to hop into this big social media ball game, but if i may, make a bold statement, social media is just a big bubble, It is getting huge and as all things, it is going to burst somehow. Why? It’s because the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

Back to the days of how getting social online started with IRC(internet relay chat), where folks like you and me just hop on to any chat room and start to get know people, download stuff and maybe, sell somethings online. It’s a framework that you can be who you want to be, because anything you reveal might not be who you really are. After a decade of it, technology evolved and eventually IRC become almost non existence. So how does it relates to social media, the truth is, today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships, likewise similar to a framework such as IRC.

The basis of being social is about relationships, about how connected you are with your online friends. But in real life, how really valuable are them to you? You might have a thousand friends and some of these friends you might not even know them personally, and let’s not even talk about sharing stuff you like with them. Like what Umair Haque mention in one of his articles, social inflation debases relationships and this indirectly affects the way brands are reaching out in the online space. You could argue that social media has alter the way of how brands talk to consumers. However, we should not forget that for most people, social networking sites are used predominantly to groom and support existing relationships. So if your brand is not genuinely trying to help user strengthen their online relationship, it’s more likely to ignored.

Moreover, trust is another important factor that users think about when communicating with brands on social media landscape. In laymen terms, the user must feel a sense of trust to be able to articulate what the brand does for them before telling their friends. There is no point in force feeding them with information which they doubt or not even want to take a second look at. Just think about when we were kids, most of us would hate those days when our parent force us to take vegetables and claiming that it’s good. Brands should start thinking about  ideas that bid well for the users before deciding to just use facebook connect or similar tools with their digital creations. The social landscape isn’t just about beauty and popularity contest, they can be more useful to user. Just like how an old saying goes, form and functionality should be balance in equal proportions.

So you may claim, “Social media has a big community, and anything we do should fly as there will always be some people who will spread it right?”. Erm, true as basis of communities are made up of people, but there is always a love and hate situation. We can’t control what people thinks about things, however, if the intend is beneficial of has a certain positive value, we can steer the way how users define the brand, in a good way.  Brands should know that communities are mainly channels for expression, and not a core idea for brand outreach. There must be solid idea for audiences to resonate themselves with, be it love or hate, at least people would understand the communication purpose.

My views on this topic is that social technology often does one thing well – extract value from thin relationships. But let’s be clear, there isn’t much gold in those hills to begin with, as they are indeed thin relationships. So before any of you out there decide to tell your client to do work on social media, do have a think about what it really does and how can it engage the audiences in a genuine manner, rather than something gimmicky.

In my humble perspective, the future of brands should concentrate on fundamentally rewiring people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships that changes behavior, rather than solely relying on extracting data with social technologies.

Like i said, this is just a hypothesis, feel free to disagree with me, and we can discuss on what to do with it.