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Beauty of Social Media

Beauty of Social Media published on 5 Comments on Beauty of Social Media

The best thing about social media is that most people still are not sure what it is all about.

Especially many businesses.
Sure, they know it has something to do with connect to their customers, but they are not precisely sure how best to do this.
Many believe the marketing department is the best part of their organisation to handle social media, as it is just another marketing medium, right?

The great thing for many “marketers” who now promote themselves as being experts in the field, is that they can claim this based on the flimsiest of reasons.
They claim to understand and be experts on this new medium, with reasons such as:

  • they migrated the company from a facebook group to a facebook page
  • they suggested adding “share to” links onto the company website
  • they have a personal blog that gets commented on at least once a month
  • they read the latest stats/graphs/demographic charts and can recite user specifics in a general sense
  • they once got the company facebook page over 200 likes in a week, by running an online competition

The truth (i.m.o.) is that the marketing department should stay away from social media in many cases. They are not always the right people for the job, and social media is not just a marketing medium.

Community managers should be employed to help mange your social media presence. These people are usually the ones with a much better understanding of the new landscape.
They can work in with marketing to help make a campaign more successful, but their most important task is to help keep your social media frontier moving forward, especially when marketing have forgotten it while they go off to prepare their next EDM strategy, or website promotion.

Who is to blame?

Who is to blame? published on 2 Comments on Who is to blame?

Very recently, I was lucky enough to be able to have lunch with Larry Katzman.
Larry (or as he is known professionally – “Kaz”) is the world’s leading cartoonist of medical humor. His Nurse Nellie cartoons have appeared in newspapers and magazines in 21 countries and were awarded the highest prize in international cartooning at the 19th International Salon of Humor in Bordighera, Italy. His book collections have sold over three million copies.

Kaz was active during the “golden age” of cartoonists when they were able to live pretty much a Rockstar life selling cartoons to publications such as the New Yorker. During this era, he was hanging out with other cartoonists such as Mort Walker, Milton Caniff, Will Eisner and Peter Arno.

Among the many interesting stories he told during lunch, one thing he said really caught me.
Kaz was talking about the gradual decline of the glory days of cartooning. He told how at first, gag cartoons would earn their creators the equivalent of around $100 per comic. (About $800 per comic in today’s terms). Soon, though, the magazines that were buying the cartoons started to reduce page count and began folding.

The reason for this was blamed on the Television being invented & eventually being available in every home.
The magazine, which was once a main source of information & entertainment, was neglected and languished in an unread pile, as the household began to instead crowd around a screen to get their information updates.
Soon, subscription rates and reader numbers declined and advertising revenue was diverted to the new media of Television.
This then forced magazines to close their doors as they became unsustainable.

Does any of that sound familiar?
When I heard it, I though immediately of the present situation that book stores and newspapers are going through.
They have been trumped by the ‘new media’ of the online platforms and have found themselves in hard times.
The situation is a direct copy of the one faced by magazines during the 50’s.

And I am sure the cycle will not stop there. At some point in the near future, even online media will face a decline in usage, as a new ‘new media’ presents itself and takes hold. And the media platform that replaces it will be blamed for the death of online.
It is just a matter of time, so rather than complain about it and try to claw people back to an ‘older’ media, businesses should spend some time to stop and look at new media platforms. Spend more than a week trying to understand  them, and begin looking to see how they can expand what they offer to keep consumers as they begin the slow transition across.

 

This has been another “agent-x”atorial

 

 

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