Misunderstood Social Media

Social media has a place in current marketing but what is the role it plays and is it really important? Depends on the goal but tradtionally, advertising is a business of transactions - trading goods and services at a ratioanal level of development. This is the level of cause and effect, logic, and a certain predictable give and take outcome.

The level of social media is actually beyond the value structure of supply and demand. Social media is literally about community. Yes, there is a certain give and take within it but the basis for the structure is not outright profit. The foundation of social media is community, opting in for the purpose of being together.

So the confusion about the two media types is that the commercial level of profit and loss is the old way of doing things. That still is the foundation of business. But the new level is not about profit and loss. It is about belonging to a group, or sharing values and the value is found in that alone.

When this started to occur naturally, the profit seekers could not comprehend why anyone would want to simply hang out in a community and not make money from it. This concept is difficult for profit people to understand. Why? Becasue they don't live like that. They are competitive by nature and in their story line, there is a winner and a loser, plain and simple. In the social values that have emerged, the winner- loser dichotomy does not apply.

The social values are enough. Self sustaining, as is, without a need for cut-throat competition. This tension between the two value levels causes all kinds of misunderstandings. For yeasr , the profit seekers heckled social media and took jabs at it for not making money. But the socials were not even trying to make money. The profits seekers could not begin to understand why anyone would be involved in an undertaking that did not center itself on competitive profit. But Social is a whole new animal. It wants to hang out for the sake of being, not doing. There is a difference.

This difference causes huge clashes of values especially among marketing types who want to make a profit as fast as possible. Many of the great marketers today do not use social media for that reason. They have not found the profit in it. Others do use it only as far as they can bend it to the old profit model.

Still, a newer breed of social entreprenuer is using social media as an indirect method of building community, and then as a result finds a way to profit as an after thought, not as the means by which the media exists. The differences are being hashed out today in hundreds of ways. The arguments will continue until an understanding is reached about joining or interrupting a conversation in the mind of the consumer. The difference is big.

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