It's useful to recall that social media sites - things like Facebook and Twitter - exist to enable user defined interaction between people. In a business context, that probably means trying to get out useful information that your community would be interested in. What it doesn't mean is an echo chamber consisting of self proclaimed "social media experts" patting each other on the back all day. Michael Pinto:

The zombies then seek each other: You'll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media "€œexperts". Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.

You see a lot of this kind of thing on Twitter - there are tons of people who chatter all day long amongst themselves about their own brilliance in this new arena. It's one thing for consultants selling that sort of expertise to do this; it's something else again to watch their fawning acolytes from product oriented companies engaging in it - what's the point?

I make use of Twitter (the vast majority of my tweets are auto-posts from this blog). I'm also on Facebook, where I cross-post the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. I like to think that broadens the potential reach of those videos. The thing is, I'm trying to use social media sites in support of my basic mission: spread Smalltalk knowledge generally, and Cincom Smalltalk knowledge specifically.

So what's the bottom line here? Social Media is a means, not an end. If you're going to jump in, you need to have a goal in mind. That goal could be personal, like "find old friends from high school". It could be a corporate goal, like "make it easier to find information about our product(s)". If it's instead something like "broadcast my brilliance in the social media environment", then there's a new catchphrase that defines what you're doing:

Fail

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter, facebook