I’ve been hearing about how various local corporations have used (or have tried to use) Social Media as their new weapon, magic bullet, etc. to tackle PR and Marketing issues.

The particular method that seems to be top of the list for companies appears to be creating a Facebook group and expecting miracles… in terms of people clamoring to join the group, keeping conversations going and generating buzz.

I have a problem with this, because this is akin to taking old mindsets of the push marketing tactics into the realm of the relatively new Social Media. Yes, it is easy and cheap free to create a Facebook group, but it is tragic when the only one posting on the walls and uploading photos is the Admin or Creator himself. Somehow, the fact that social media is largely about User Generated Content (UGC) seems to be lost on the Suits. So, I feel compelled to highlight the key words: USER GENERATED content.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is the next book that I intend to pick up – because it sounds so awfully interesting. I was fascinated by this article in which the author, Clay Shirky, highlighted a simple, but oft overlooked point regarding the positives of how Gen Y hardly watches television anymore. This might be bad for Television networks, but good for content creation. The bottom line is, all that time that used to be spent vegging out in front of the idiot box can, and is partially allocated to creating and sharing material online. Shirky’s “social surplus” or TV surplus is a powerful force to be reckoned with.
I know it seems like a simple point, but for me, it certainly opened up a lot of possibilities to think about.

And yes, this social surplus is also the main thing that a lot of companies still fail to harness, because their psychological mobility in terms of digital strategy is often close to zero.

• They keep assuming that people will be automatically interested in them and their group.  (People are not.)
• They assume that people will want to be (publicly) associated with the Facebook group they have created. (If your group’s function and content is similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, I hope you see an issue here.)
  
• They assume that people will keep returning to a group they’ve joined. (Are you giving them reasons to? Wall posts on groups are not shown in Facebook users’ Update feeds, so assuming = making an Ass out of U+Me.)

I see no point in creating something with Social Media and then making it a one-sided conversation, such as using a Facebook Group like a website in which content flow is largely top down…because then group content is not even easily searchable publicly. Users are also not in the habit for searching through Groups for information as compared to website search engines, and you would be better off harnessing some other Web 1.0 method, aka creating a traditional website.

…True?

Tags: web2.0, clay shirky, gen y, user generated conent, ugc, social media, corporations, book, facebook, facebook groups, conversations, social surplus, tv surplus,