I’ve been in my new role now for a little over five months, and am starting to make some sense of what I am here to do. In essence, my team is responsible for making people in the UK technology sector, and in particular those in the world of software development and others in the more general field of IT, feel good about the platforms (ie clients and servers) that Microsoft has now and is bringing to market in the future.
This work, known internally as technology evangelism, has gone through a steady evolution in recent years, from something that was very much in person whereby the evangelists would spend most of their time appearing at events, to something that has become increasingly online, where blogging and tweeting are of equal if not greater importance to the work than speaking at conferences.
Looking at where we, and other organisations, are today, it seems that whilst many organisations are taking advantage of Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, very few are actually exploiting the Social side of it, instead trying to shoehorn traditional mass media, broadcast models of thinking into the new platforms. There is something a little bit icky about a major international brand asking people to “like” it or “be its friend” (just in the way that there is something a bit icky about a person asking someone else to “like” them in real life).
I’ve written before about how cars, when first invented, went through the horseless carriage phase, when the design of the old technology determined the look of the new (literally, horse carriages with an obtrusively equine hole on the front). It took maybe 20 years for auto manufacturers to start to establish a form for cars that was truly a car. Media have gone through similar evolutionary phases, and old media adapt to the challenge of new media over time too (see the death of the cinema newsreel as a case in point).
Today we find ourselves at the beginning of a new world where everyone has a voice if you choose to use it. Whilst we aren’t all of equal voice, put your mind to it and you have access to the means of media production in a way that I think is unprecedented in history.
So, how might this shape marketing – how can marketing focus on the Social rather than just the Media of Web 2.0? My hunch is that it comes down to thinking in new ways about influence: rather than deliver messages in a controlled manner, influence in a social media world becomes softer, a longer game, and one based on provoking and curating conversations, and also helping to allow advocates of what you believe to become stronger influencers in their own right.
This latter point comes from the observation that it is very risky to try and change the mind of someone who is of influence already because if you don’t convince them, at very best they’ll just stay schtum and at worst they’ll tell the world that you tried to change their minds. In a world where many of us have access to the means of social media production, surely it’s a better bet to try to help people who do agree with you to have the means to amplify their voices a bit?
It’s a scary proposition for organisations that are used to trying to control messages. In this new, pull influence world, messages aren’t controlled – just seeds sown and conversations started. Being the host to those conversations, though, can be a surprisingly powerful place to be.
mmitII 