Allen and Pete: A Snapshot.

I was reading some emails today between Pete and Allen regarding social media and marketing and it occurred to me that this makes a really good example of how we work, all the time, everyday. I thought I would share...

Allen sent this out about a piece of research he had found.

“Social media is an important shift, as it summarizes the importance of interaction, the consumer and the community. The term emphasizes the idea that as a collective it can have as much impact as any traditional media platform.

In truth, to claim social media as “new” is slightly misleading. From the beginning, the Internet was founded on message boards, chat rooms and peer to peer communication. What has changed is the mass involvement that modern social platforms inspire.

Contributing to the Internet has never been as accessible and less technical. Innovations in web development, computing technology and the proliferation of broadband have come together (to) drive monumental consumer take up. This is why the phenomenon of social media is important now – it has the potential to impact on all our media consumption therefore shifting the emphasis from professional content producers to the consumer.”

-Universal McCann study

Pete's response.

Absolutely no question: what’s changed is the ease of distribution, not the behavioral drivers behind it. This is why WOM has existed as long as human beings have been able to communicate. The trap we fall into now, with all the shiny objects of the last 5-10 years, is in looking at it too narrowly—ie, only in terms of the online experience (and sometimes even forgetting newer mobile technologies)—thereby adding one more stupid silo to the brand marketing mix. (That’s also why marketers who obsess about “digital digital digital” conjure up images in my mind of marketers in the 1950s who might have similarly obsessed about vacuum tubes or the size of a TV antenna: that ain’t the point!)

The very important corollary to all of this is that we can’t talk about “social media and marketing” while staying stuck in the idea that we each develop attachments to brands merely as atomistic individuals (“Brand X satisfies my needs and desires”) with little or no thought to the social dimensions of brand meaning. In my opinion, this is probably the most powerful and profound part of the work we’ve been doing over the last 4-5 months, and that I look forward to developing further for our clients and WG. –Pete

It is exciting to be around people like this because they do this all day long. What will tomorrow bring?