Smarter Conversations in Social Media for Entrepreneurs

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Technology Thursday

I continue to watch with interest, and a bit of detachment, the constant swirl around social media including Facebook's privacy-destroying machinations, Twitter's continued attempts to scale its services reliably, Apple's apparently pathetic attempt at Ping (some sort of social networking for music, but early reports suggest it's not particularly well thought out), and on and on. And then there's nearly every corporation and organization's attempts to harness the web and social media. All very interesting to watch and understandable, of course. But I think part of my detachment comes from my sense that social media is not really anything new. It's just people. People talking. Sure, there are new tools. And the particulars of the tools facilitate interesting emergent behaviors (tweeting is different from blogging is different from Dear Diary-ing a paper journal).

But, ultimately it all comes down to people having things to say and wanting to find people to say them to. And, well, I suppose, sometimes people want to listen. Mostly, though, we are a jabbery sort. So I found Hugh MacLeod's recent post about smarter conversations interesting, though he's using "conversation" as a metaphor and his advice is aimed at entrepreneurs and people trying to build and grow businesses.

(MacLeod, by the way, has a newsletter/mailing list to which he posts a new cartoon and some writing every day. I get it in RSS rather than an email, and since 'organize my RSS mess, er, feeds' has been a ToDo for eons, I don't actually read it every day, but I should. It's good. Check it out. I also recommend his book, Ignore Everybody.) Anyway, MacLeod on smarter conversations:

Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen. That’s all. Why do some companies lose, while other companies win? Because the latter has a smarter “conversation” with its customers.

[...] Social Media allows you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.

[...] Ask not what tools you want to use, ask how you want to change how you talk to people. All evolutions in marketing are evolutions in language. Those who can raise the level of conversation in any market, win.

I also particularly appreciated the notion that business drivers are not the only dimension:

Deciding to have a smarter conversation isn’t a business decision, it’s a moral decision. Like I said in the last point, the barriers to entry are zero. While your competition treats their customers like idiots, you treat your customers like intelligent human beings. You don’t do that because your accountant told you to, you do that because that’s who you are.

While new and emerging tools may be an important component to meeting your goals, even more important is staying focused on who you are, what you're trying to accomplish (beyond "use social media") and having authentic conversations. This applies as well to personal goals and projects as it does to business efforts. We could probably all stand to focus a bit on having--starting and participating in--smarter conversations.