Whatever happened to social media?

When I started out as a social media pro I did so with a belief that social delivered something extra and different that media didn't. This was a world of The Arab Spring and of the post-riot, self-organised clean-up of London's streets.

Social promised a way of building relationships - bringing people together who shared the same purpose, to not just talk about things, but to find that they cared enough about the same purpose that the would choose to DO something to make things better.

It offered an open and two-way door to the customer. It offered a platform to bring together people of shared purpose to create things that mattered to them - meeting their needs with a new level of accuracy and fidelity. It was potentially transformative for the way not just marketing was done, but for product, service and experience design with the customer genuinely at the heart.

I pushed the 'customer-led' vs customer-centric agenda - arguing that to be customer-led was to build a relationship of trust in which each partner had the other's best interests at heart. Customer-Led became one of the 10 Principles of Open Business defined in my book.

I suggested to our clients that it would not be long before there would be a Director of Social Media in every boardroom - driving the customer-led agenda, pouring insight into every business decision, shaping products and services to be the co-created near-perfect fit with end-user need.

I summed it up the additional value of social media over traditional media in diagrams like this from 2009:

and this:

From my article 'The social media bum steer' in 2010.

So why is professional social media so far distant from that promise today? It seems to me the focus has been too great on 'media' to the detriment of 'social'. I've seen the organisations in which the CEO has sat down with Zuckerberg and colluded on achieving 1m Likes! Vanity metrics have taken over from value metrics. Social Media has become just another place to broadcast your message in. A channel.

It has drifted too hard and fast towards being just another ad. And ads, by their nature, are about convincing people they need something, when the focus should be on connecting people to make something.

Perhaps the 'Director of Social Media' role on the board has been taken by the Director of CX?

The value in social comes from understanding that it:

• Delivers insight for not only CX, but also for product and service design. 
• Makes insight interactive and ongoing - providing a relationship-building dialogue with customers.
• Offers a platform for purpose-inspired connection and co-creation aligning directly to end user need
• Provides P2P opportunities to communicate via authentic relationships.
• Is the connection with customers that every successful company needs.

Our buying our way to eyeballs and the platforms ongoing refusalto be anything more than (increasingly monopolistic) media companies doesn't up.

But we can reclaim the value social media always promised if we remember - It's social first. Media second. 

It's time social media grew up and started delivering on all the human-centred extra value we have always known it can create.

One last image from more than a decade ago...

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

The power of asking the wrong question

 Sometimes the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the question.

And that, in itself, is a problem for...er problem solving.

Let me explain. Imagine you have a client has asked you to build a better mousetrap.

You may spend many a fruitless hour seeking incremental improvements. You set off a stream of work on spring mechanics. Another on bait testing. Still another expends effort on reducing the number and cost of moving parts. After much effort you present you MVP. It ain't going to remake the market.

But what if we reframe the problem - by asking a different question?

How do I rid buildings of mice?

Now we have a world of new possibilities to explore - sonic and scent deterrents, scare cats, etc.

Sometimes the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the question. It introduces constraints that need not be applied.

Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash