Social—the most overplayed word in history!
There is one reason and one reason only I dislike listening to music radio stations—that is repeats of the same songs over and over again. Songs quickly become overplayed and out wear their welcome fare too quickly. Nothing is simpler then plugging in my iPod and listening to what I chose and only what I chose. Sometimes it is an oldie and sometimes it is a little Black-eyed Peas. Okay I feel better now that I have gotten that out of system.
What does this and the title of this blog post have in common? Do a google search for me, better yet I did it for you. I searched the phrase ‘social media’ which returned 157,000,000 results and that is just the tip of it! ( see for yourself ) You turn on the TV and guaranteed some news station or some infomercial is talking about ‘social media’. Your email inbox is slammed with offers, updates, blog posts and the like all telling you about this ‘social media’. You go to conferences and meet ‘social media’ experts or hear of a speaker coming into town that is a ‘social media’ expert. Even my blog post has been shoving the word ‘social media’ into your eyeballs!
Enough. Enough with the most overplayed word in human history. Yes it is a hot topic, yes we have new vehicles of transportation in its’ world, but in no way is it new. Let me take you back to the 1950’s when homes were separated by 3 foot picket fences and neighbors talked about children, vacations and yes even products right there over that little picket fence. How incredible would it have been for Coca Cola to have installed microphones on the fences and each time someone said the word “Coca Cola” they would have it recorded? Well welcome to 2009 when business could start just that.
The art of communication as been around since the dawn of time and since the creation of the first wheel company, business owners have given anything to know and understand their consumers. Now businesses have these great tools in Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and so on, where endusers freely post truckloads of content and data and somehow this has transcended time and social media was just created. Somehow someone has made us believe that we don’t know how to be social and we need the media to educate us and train us. Somehow the word social has become another word for Facebook or Twitter. This is all just not the case.
Simply put as a business owner your social media has always been there and it will continue to be there long after Facebook and Twitter are gone ( yes they will be gone MySpace ). The word social has been overplayed and oversold. It is a very important and part of your business, but it always has been and always will be. Stop thinking you need to change yourself to be a part of a new transportation device. No matter what car you drive there is always a gas pedal, a brake system, a forward, a backward and a left and right. You may drive some cars faster and some may pull you out of the muck, but at the end of the day you will—drive.
For those of us out there that are looking to make this social world our world and consult others on it, lets remember the following; non of us are experts in Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or the like, yet. We have to put the ‘time’ into it to become an expert. We may have social experience, but the transportation devices are infants and we need to respect that for our clients. We are all experimenting. Further more lets stop overplaying the word and focus on the oldies which are still amazing goodies!
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