I had a conversation with a marketing peer from SacTown at a community event a couple of days ago and being geographically located outside of Facebook Country she made a comment about how much us marketing folks in The Valley are so in love with social networking sites and basically social media in general. She then introduced me to another colleague and described me as a “Web2.0 groupie.”
She uses social media as well but more in the context of “I gotta be present where my users are.” She didn’t mean offense but the comment showed that there are still those of us in marketing who don’t don’t see the value in social media beyond reaching the cool kids.I can see where she’s coming from, though. Hearing myself say “I use Delicious” for marketing and “widgets to distribute content” with all the new terms it can seem kinda like a clique. I can’t do anything about the terminology, but I assure you social media is more than that.
And maybe the media has something to do with it as well (oh here we go blaming the media again?). I was being interviewed by a reporter by a Bay Area paper on my use of social media and while I kept talking about how I use various social media tools in marketing for various things like productivity (RSS feeds for faster blog reading), content distribution and listening to the community of users, the reporter kept on pulling the conversation back to how I use it to express myself and showing the world who I am. Yes, I do a lot of that too, but it’s not mainly why I do it. So if you see a story somewhere with something that goes “Lisa Amorao uses Facebook apps to show her friends that her favorite band is My Chemical Romance” you know what happened there. But that’s her story and I’m sure it will be a great article on whatever angle she’s taking. Anyhow the point I was trying to make is that outside of the web industry, there’s still a huge group of people who haven’t gotten past MySpace when thinking about social networking.
