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The Green Thing

Our former colleague Giovanni Rodriguez worries that “community” is under stress from commercial interests that would abuse the label. “A fair number of people in my world have wondered if marketers are using the word to whitewash their commercial interests.”

I say, take heart. Unlike fabricated labels such as “Web 2.0,” “community” is a real word with some clear definitions. Web 2.0 was coined to refer to a new generation of web-based services and tools, including social networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies, but was quickly adopted as a catch phrase referring to all sorts of things, including websites, businesses, business models, even completely unrelated technologies. And since few actually knew what it meant and investment dollars poured in, little could be done to stop the flood.

But “community” means something generally understood, and if folks start using it for something that isn’t in the spirit of a community, readers will more easily detect it. At the same time, it’s important not to force this broad term to mean only one type of online community. Perhaps we need to keep a modifier in front of it – something more specific and informative than “online” – so we preserve usefulness of the general term and encourage other types of communities, online and off.

Another word feeling the stress is “green.” Although we can all agree that one definition of “green” is “environmentally sound or beneficial,” agreeing on what is environmentally sound or beneficial is far more difficult—which means “green” can end up meaning just about anything.

We may well have reached a tipping point with support for environmental issues. Tim Dyson is hopeful. Hollywood has gone green. Evangelicals have gone green. And PRWeek is holding its first-ever green conference in San Francisco because “Corporations are going green like never before.” But that may also mean that many other companies will soon turn green with envy and start spending the green to convince everyone they too are going green. So while we may finally be planting the right garden, there will still likely be plenty of weeding to do.

Recommending liberal use of the "a" word*

Hugh MacLeod argues that "public relations is getting social media all wrong," and paraphrases Stowe Boyd: "Please, please, please dont talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media." Boyd is, in turn, paraphrasing Doc Searls. Well, now that you have the family tree, let me make my point.

Boyd offers some good advice:

"Drop the old speak: no more 'audience', no more third-party writing, no more 'wink, wink' complicity in totally false quotes and knowingly working with clients on spin instead of open dialogue. School your clients to do the right thing, not just wrap themselves in a bunch of psychobabble about social interaction with their 'communities' without actually adopting a new mindset."

I differ on only one point. It's a mistake to stop thinking about your audience, and eliminating the word from your vocabulary serves no purpose other than to appease the social media elite. The idea that corporate communications and marketing people are clueless because they use the word "audience" is a popular red herring among anti-traditional communications jihadists. While the dictionary definition of audience might imply one-way communications to a captive and passive group, the concept, properly applied, is a powerful one that is highly relevant in social media strategy. In the corporate world, segmentation allows a company to enable effective communications with its various audiences. These audiences include customers, prospects, shareholders, business partners, employees, developers, journalists, bloggers, securities analysts, industry analysts and other influential groups that the company needs to reach.

Each of these groups has different interests. Securities analysts, for example, are interested almost exclusively in the company's financial performance, and generally don't want to hear about product features or corporate social responsibility. Developers want to know about tools, and the availability of software updates and bug fixes.

By understanding their audience(s), bloggers can engage in more interesting and effective conversations. If I visit the blog of an expert in Service Oriented Architectures and read a post on his experience trying to replace a stolen Blackberry, that might be mildly interesting (OK, it isn't), but would have no value to me. I'd rather learn about the blogger's views on the role of open source in SOA adoption. Unless he is an exceptionally good writer, the blogger who writes about nothing but airports and stolen Blackberries is a narcissist, who has failed to consider his audience, readership, whatever. And I don't care how articulate, funny, or clever a blogger is. If he or she has nothing of interest to say to me, (a disregard for audience), then that blogger and the company are wasting their time and mine.

It's ultimately an argument over semantics. Stowe suggests we use the word "people" instead of audience, which is to me some kind of weird political correctness. And its generic and amorphous, and lead us away from an understanding of who were are trying to communicate with. (Stowe also suggests calling social media users "edgelings," a suggestion I simply can't respond to.)

So my advice is to keep using "audience" to describe a specific group that you want to reach with your communications. It's a useful and well understood term, and as long as you don't actually view your social media as one-way communications to a passive, monolithic audience, you'll be fine. If you do think of your audience this way, you'll wind up saying lame things like "most PR folk are still pretty clueless."

* Portions of this post appeared recently in a post on my personal blog.

More Social Media

Steve Rubel has again called for the elimination of the label “social media.” And again I’ll disagree.

Rubel’s underlying premise is right:

“The fact is that everyone who is contributing to the dialogue - be it in video, text or photos - has earned the right to be called media.”

But I disagree with his rationale for eliminating the label:

“It’s like we’re a separate entity from the rest of the so-called “mainstream” journalists, filmmakers, photographers, etc. who do what we do and get paid more for it. We sit in a special dish like leftover meatloaf so we need a special name. If you use these phrases you're unintentionally perpetuating that myth.”

First of all, mainstream media and much of the public love (or have finally embraced) the social media phenomenon, so the “special dish” is clearly in the main course and there’s nothing “leftover” about it.

More important, we need the label to understand the phenomenon. We come to understand new things by looking at something we already understand (mainstream media) and explaining the differences (the social elements). For this reason, Rubel admits that “the phrases were helpful as the world began to take notice. But now, it’s different. We’ve arrived.” Well, Rubel has arrived. Mainstream media, Silicon Valley, and millions of people around the world have also arrived. But not everyone, and we certainly are not finished understanding how this arrival is changing the world. Imagine trying to write about how media is changing today without using “social media.” It can’t be done. The label is not a buzzword, and it will disappear from current usage slowly. And it will take up permanent residence in history books.

Meanwhile, I propose satisfying Rubel (I hope) by stating clearly that he and all bloggers are part of the media, without any limiting modifier. But I insist on saying that he got there by being very smart about and being a leader in the development of social media.