Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott, Kevin Nalty, Steve Garfield - Страница 53

If you follow my metaphor of the web as a city, then think of social media and the ways that people interact on blogs, forums, and social networking sites as the bars, private clubs, and cocktail parties of the city. To extend the (increasingly tortured) analogy even further, Twitter can be compared to the interlude when the girls go to the ladies’ room and talk about the guys, and the guys are discussing the girls while they wait.

Viewing the web as a sprawling city where social media are the places where people congregate to have fun helps us make sense of how marketers can best use the tools of social media. How do you act in a cocktail party situation?

 Do you go into a large gathering filled with a few acquaintances and tons of people you do not know and shout, “BUY MY PRODUCT!”?

 Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a business card before you agree to speak with them?

 Do you try to meet every single person, or do you have a few great conversations?

 Do you listen more than you speak?

 Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no expectation of getting something tangible in return?

 Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties altogether because you are uncomfortable in such situations?

I find these questions are helpful to people who are new to social media. This analogy is also a good one to discuss with social media cynics and those who cannot see the value of this important form of communication.

The web-as-a-city approach is especially important when dealing with people who have been steeped in the traditions of advertising-based marketing, those skilled at interrupting people to talk up products and using coercion techniques to make a sale. Sure, you can go to a cocktail party and treat everyone as a sales lead while blabbing on about what your company does. But that approach is unlikely to make you popular.

Guess what? The popular people on the cocktail circuit make friends. People like to do business with people they like. And they are eager to introduce their friends to one another. The same trends hold true in social media. So go ahead and join the party. But think of it as just that—a fun place where you give more than you get. Of course, you can also do business there, but the kind you do at a cocktail party and not at the general store. What you get in return for your valuable interactions are lasting friendships, many of which lead to business opportunities.

This chapter is an introduction to the concepts of social media. In subsequent chapters, I go into much greater detail about blogs (Chapters 5 and 15), video (Chapters 6 and 17), and social networking (Chapter 14).