HIT

Today’s hit is a bit of research a friend passed to me about social networking from Brian Solis.

http://www.briansolis.com/2011/10/social-medias-impending-flood-of-customer-unlikes-and-unfollows/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+briansolis+%28Brian+Solis%29

It strikes me the Social Networking bubble may be reaching its popping stage for commercial use. This blog by new media guru Brian Solis reveals the emerging limitations to the “click on like” “become our friend” culture of most social networks that means organisations may be getting far less benefit than they hoped.

But should we be surprised?

Another top guy from the new media world, Paul Adams of Google published this slidshare presentation a few months back.

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2#

As someone who has always advocated the importance of keeping people at the centre of our thinking when we try to communicate on behalf of organisations, this really struck a chord with me.

He states “New technology doesnʼt change how our brains work. Social networks are not new. For thousands of years, people have formed into groups, built strong and weak relationships with others, formed allegiances, and spread rumor and gossip.
The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world. As technology changes the tools we use to communicate, we still use the same behavior patterns that we evolved over those thousands of years.”

What I take from both of these pieces of comment is; focus on the people you want to engage with, before you focus on the means of engagement and the technology you can employ.

We’re always guilty in PR, marketing and advertising of fetishising technology, we’re drawn to the new and shiny gizmos of communication when what we should first consider are human factors that are many millenia old.

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