Michael Szul, owner of Overmortal Technologies and I chatted for a while last night about social media. Today he sent me a blog post he wrote about our conversation and what he got out of it.
There’s a couple of interesting blog posts about social media out there today:
What about the in of social media
and Jeremiah Owyang’s commentary on how media brands are building their own social networks.
Social media is about an exchange of information, on one level, and on another level is a relationship building activity. Both of the above mentioned blog entries focus on this subject from different angles.
The first blog post discusses the need to invite the conversation to come in. Reach out and communicate, but also be prepared for feedback, and for letting the people you connect with into your circle. It’s quite true and important to let people into your circle, as well as reaching out. In fact if you only ever focus on trying to reach as many people as possible, but don’t necessarily invite them to really get to know you, it can be very hard to really connect in a meaningful way. It instead becomes a superficial method of touching people.
The other blog post is discussing how some companies are starting to create specialized social media sites as ways of further branding what they do, while also reaching out to the online community overall. It’s a novel idea, but also a further commercialization of social media for corporate purposes. At the same time, having specialized branded social media sites could in fact invite the depth of conversation I mentioned above, though not necessarily in as open a forum as regular social media sites offer.
My take on all of this is that what we’re seeing is the continued evolution of social media. It’s not just about reaching out, but also creating relationships where we get to know each other, so it’s not just selling the brand, but also dealing with the criticisms of that brand. And branded social media sites are essentially inviting that kind of depth of conversation in, while also continuing to advertise the brand, in an effort to sell it. What social media users need to decide is if that will create a genuine relationship, or just be more of trying to reach out, without actually engaging the social media users.
