I went to a seminar on Social Media run by CBS radio and I had a ball. It wasn't the best event ever, but it was informative and at points there were even a few laughs. I loved it because it was like dipping my toe back into the world of work and business and communicating with adults and management and jargon and buzz words and.... and it just made me happy.
One of the best bits was the understanding. I understood what all of the speakers were talking about, indeed I'd wished they'd gone in a bit deeper. As with most business seminars, there were too many lists of important cliches, like "it's important to be authentic." I'm not sure why there seems to be an assumption that it used to be a successful strategy in business to lie. The saying, "you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time" is as old as time itself. Though I suppose it's more relevant when you're broadcasting over twitter to everyone, and that just one person can expose a lie with crushing effectiveness.
My favorite part of the experience was when I followed our host's instructions and asked a question of the panel by tweeting with the hash tag #cbssoc. The panel were somewhat lost in a love-in about the beautiful effect that an influential blogger can have when they mention your product favorably. I'd recently read an article about how bloggers reviewing movies seem to be pretty much in line with the reviews that the traditional media are publishing. Further, universal critical acclaim by bloggers and the traditional media wasn't having much effect on audience figures. It's thought that we are actually persuaded more by our facebook friends' status on which movies to see and that the reviews have little sway whatsoever.
So I tweeted, "Do bloggers really matter, most seem to review similarly to traditional media journalists? #cbssoc." Mine was the first question of the panel and the host introduced it with the statement, "I don't think he was intending to be insulting..."
Hmm. I was a little nervous. I hadn't meant to insult and so it appeared I'd just demonstrated what I'd call, "the law of unintended consequences" and others what called something different and added to their lists of important things to always consider... I so hate those lists, almost as much as I hate the phrase "it's just common sense." Common sense isn't common, experience is individual and so common experience is as rare as common conclusions. It's often said that if 10 people witness an accident they'll give 10 different views, so where's this common sense then? Sorry, I'm ranting and off topic. I was lucky and had not insulted the panel. In fact their response was wonderful, as they gave real life examples as to how blogs had directly helped their brands, businesses and clients.
And later when I got home, I started to get some responses to my tweet. The first was from @tdhurst saying, "I'm a writer who blogs. I matter." So back to that list of important things to consider... your digital footprint doesn't go away, even and especially if, you try to ignore it.
Over time I've become convinced that I learn far more by doing, than by reading books - especially if those books are full of lists of important things you should always consider. So this one day seminar has taught me quite a lot really.
I think the day could have been better though. It would have been nice if they had tried to create an online community of the audience or just used social media more innovatively throughout the day. However it's all too easy to give advice in hindsight and I didn't stay till the end, so my review loses some credibility as I missed the last speaker. My excuse is that I finally left because the thermostat was set to ABERDEEN-SCOTLAND and although I tweeted about that too, I think they only reset it to FALKIRK-SCOTLAND. As I remember it, on many of the lists of important things to consider, were strategies to respond to negative criticism or comments.
Glad you had fun! Interesting reactions to your question. Seems with every new medium that emerges, there's a bunch of people who get very excited about it, immediately followed by a bunch of people who get very cynical about it. Some of those cynics are purveyors of the "old" medium: painters dissed photography; filmmakers dissed TV, etc. Others, I suspect, just want to appear discerning - not easily bamboozled like those naive/breathless/euphoric bandwagon-jumpers. The reality of most things is somewhere in the middle. But moderate positions are often misread as one extreme or the other. It seems all too easy to hit the "unintended consequences" button in such historically sticky situations. It's not you; the button just needs some WD-40.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about the article you read and also about the panelists' responses to your question. I've noticed from a small, unscientific sample of myself/friends/family, that for some things, peer review has eclipsed traditional media. I.e., Amazon product reviews, Yelp reviews of local businesses, Tripadvisor, et al. for hotels. Who cares anymore what an "expert" who tested that waffle iron for 10 minutes thinks, when we can find out what fifty "real" users think after they've used it for awhile?
But - back to movie reviews. Both the mainstream media journalist and the blogger probably sat through the same movie once. Does the blogger, then, have any more expertise simply by virtue of being a "real" person? Perhaps, if the assumption is that being a mainstream journalist corrupts one's opinion. But the movie reviewer who is going to seem to me to have most "real" experience is the person with the most similar taste in movies to mine. So it would make sense that people would give a lot of weight to Facebook Friends' status messages (at least those Friends we deem to have "good" taste in movies!)
Blogs are less hierarchical than traditional media, but they still have a one-to-many hierarchical structure. (Which is why I write these long comments, so your blog won't get too top-heavy. ;-) ) They're certainly better for reviewing things than the Facebook status box. But - I think - like everything else, they need to find their way in a time of shifting ideas of authority, expertise, influence and friendiness.
And remember, you can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, you can't pick your friend's nose, but you *can* pick your friend's movies.
But I am not an authority. On any of it.