What Presidents Both Dead and Alive Tell Me About the Future of Social Media - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

I39ve been feeling so patriotic lately First I went to my office early to watch the Inauguration with my team last week and I39ve been enjoying the celebrated HBO series John Adams I can39t seem to get enough of this talk of inalienable rights sovereignty and selfevident truthsOur democracy was in some ways the very first usergenerated initiative of this country Like social media is now it was propagated by a few forwardminded people white men quite frankly but became universal in nature Women and minorities have taken leadership roles in the system it has enabled their voices to be heardWhat I find most fascinating is how our country39s Founding Fathers fumbled their way into a system we all hold to be sacred today In one memorable scene in John Adams the title character played by the amazing Paul Giamatti is proposing to the first postRevolutionary Congress suggestions for what the new country39s first President George Washington should be calledquotYour Majesty the Presidentquot he suggests to a collective groan among his peersHe continuesquotYour Eminence the Presidentquot and the groans get louderWhat strikes me here is that even in the midst of diametric change in government one of the greatest instigators of that change still managed to revert to monarchical obsolete terms unaware of how much the former system he despised had become ingrained in his psychic picture of leadershipThis episode made me wonder if we in the digital media world too have just emerged from something revolutionary with the quotpowerquot now acknowledged as belonging to the customer And yet our psychic picture of marketing models remains prerevolutionary even elitist Until we fully embrace the spirit of social media we are working with a faulty system A democracy that hears only a few That39s not just unfortunate that39s inefficientWhile we39re making all attempts at grokking the concepts dipping budgets into social media experiments for mere seconds at a time even following Mombloggers on Twitter we do so thinking that this is only temporarythis reverence for the ordinary Once we think of something better something more Superbowlworthy to produce this usergen thing will go awayIt also makes me wonder What will it take before we really trust this model as inherently as we do less accountable media such as television As much as we trust in say democracyIn the absence of the perfect metric for user engagement recent events have given me glimpses of the answerThe economic slowdown There are moments in history that have a forceful effect on the psyche and while this recession is not exactly the most convenient of events it does make for an amazing leveler It has challenged onceworshipped tactics such as dumping entire budgets into 30second Superbowl ads to not rest on their laurels As you can see from Pepsi39s latest reinvention campaign which provides portable code to anyone wanting to embed Pepsi brands39 digital components to their site there39s no point in fleeting fancy concepts that can39t be perpetuated among your customersIf at one time brands weren39t spending more on social media because they couldn39t control the message in it they are now because they just can39t afford not to leverage the potential onetomany effect The bang for the buck surely beats the stock markets these days And controlling our message while less risky is not efficient In the process of trying more viral forms of engagement we39ve found that tapping the long tailhowever imperfect it may beamp8212is also extremely effective Nobody can promote your brand better to potential customers than customersIn a market where your customers are actively spending less you need to distinguish yourself more Just like advertisers consumers who run households still need to spend money They are going to think harder about how much they spend and with whom You need to be where they live and increasingly that39s online We can all argue about the future of display advertising and CPMs but being seen in the most impassioned places now trumps how you39re charged for itA new president Our former administration had the luxury of making decisions largely unwitnessed by the people or as one former President might say quotThe Internetsquot The utter dismantling of that form of government occurred not from the demands of our new President or even a few intellectuals on MSNBC but from the overwhelming buyin of the cheated debtridden foreclosedupon public Obama39s insistence on his role as a communicator of desired change not the arbiter of it is what has made even his first week in office memorable and I predict will make his Presidency effectiveIn a recent New York Times Magazine piece quotMultiscreen Mad Menquot a transcript of a conversation among advertising agency executives Robert Rasmussen of RGA saidquotA brand could tell people what was cool because there was less freedom of choice in media A brand could say 39This is the latest thing and everybody is doing it39 and if the message was persuasive enough you might believe it Now you can check on that on the Internet and see whether everybody actually is doing itquotEven the title of the Times piece underlines the change in our perspective the Mad Men of the late 1950s were oligarchs of trends They declared what was hot Today39s Mad Men are not only largely women but more noticers of changeThe market cannot be determined any longer by a few with access to data or budget Listening isn39t just a gimmick it39s a means of survivalA collective desire to serve President Obama often evokes this growing public desire of people to serve their country I think he39s onto somethingIn my last column I pointed to some microtrends that I hoped would not perpetuate in 2009 If I had to define a common thread connecting them it would be that they all stem from a superficial understanding of social media at best and at worst an attempt to exploit it But those that transcend into the WordofMouth Hall of Fame have tended to pull at something we don39t always know we have in usamp8212a desire to help others Those Liberty Mutual commercials are not brilliantly written but are brilliantly evocative of what39s true We want to help and when we39re helped we39re compelled to pay it forwardBlogging would not have grown so exponentially if it hadn39t been supported by an underlying motivation to help Sure content gets you somewhere but colinking and sharing is what gets you a core following that grows Service is sewn into successI39ll wait patiently for the HBO Series about the rise of social media maybe this one will also be produced by Tom Hanks I39m dying to see who gets to play Arianna Huffington or Carol Bartz I39m certain of one thing The enduser will be on the winning sideAs cofounder and President of Strategic Alliances for BlogHer Jory Des Jardins is an innovator in online advertising women39s media and Internet entrepreneurship Jory can be contacted at jorybloghercomRead all Joryamp8217s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at Jory Des Jardin MediaBizBlogger

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

What Presidents Both Dead and Alive Tell Me About the Future of Social Media - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

Publish date

Channel

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

More Videos:

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

What Presidents Both Dead and Alive Tell Me About the Future of Social Media - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

Enjoying This Commentary? There's More to Love

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

The payment was successful

Cookies