Can Brands Enable Social Engagement?

MediaPost has a great article given by J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich Partners, entitled Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market.

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a context for people to engage with one another. People don’t want to see ads; they want to see their friends. And while they’re doing so, they’ll do business as well....Instead of isolating people into private experiences shared with no one else or clustering people into closed communities of narrow interests, the Internet is bringing people together in new and unprecedented ways.

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(What makes for) the killer app isn’t Fox’s online content; it’s social engagement at MySpace.com. Social engagement is the platform on which business can be done.

I love reading how the advertising industry talks to inself. Overall I see the industry having a very hard time dealing with the web and finding ways to engage with people and charge for that engagement. Mostly existing tactics have been ported from existing media.

The article does hit a couple of good grounders identifying the new value drivers online but it misses the home runs:

• social engagement is not the ‘latest killer app,’ it’s not an app. Social engagement is what we do as humans. The web just allows people to do what they want in new ways and at different scales.
• people are most locked into experiences not by the interface or subscription fees or the data that they have invested in a site and will have to reinvest in another site, which is painful, if they make a switch, but by other people. And not just by volume but by quality. What’s quality? It’s different for each of us, that’s what makes it interesting.
• “...where people are engaged and interacting, they’ll do business, too.” Only if that same place meets their needs. I use Flickr to store and share my photos. But if I wanted to print them in an album and Flickr only offered a subpar option, I’d take my photos elsewhere to have them developed into an album. Portability is here and the people formerly known as audience know it.
• “There’s a new appreciation that people like talking to other people, not to brands. In fact, at Yankelovich we’ve documented how little people want to be marketed to these days.” People talk to brands? The reason advertising is in such deep decay is that people in the industry say and write these kinds of things. If no one hears a brand in a forest, does it exist?
• “Technological advances always increase control, but in the past this has mostly been an increase in collective rather than individual control.” Wrong. Almost all recent (the last 20 years) computer technology has been focused on serving the interests of organizations because they were the ones buying it and that’s what they wanted. The shift to enabling individuals to do things with computer technology (task enabling) from enabling organizations to control their employees (control enabling) is what I see as the biggest shift in what is collectively called Web 2.0. The best delineation I’ve encountered of task-enabling technology versus power-enabling technology is in Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. Read it and you’ll see.

As a personal anecdote, I recently stopped using Yahoo as my RSS reader. I had been thinking about it for awhile but waffled on moving because I’d invested my time in subscribing to over 100 feeds. I had no way to export them so I kept using Yahoo and I kept hating Yahoo for giving me no way to export them. Then I reached a tipping point and it became worth it to move all those feeds to Bloglines. Why? So that I could create a blogroll like the one you see to the left under Leading Readings.