Social media has been spreading like a disease, except it’s not a disease. It’s the overnight sensation that’s taken about 7 years to appear overnight. Everyone, but everyone’s had a look at Social Media and formed an opinion – waste of time, waste of money, don’t understand it, can’t see the point. Maybe they’ve become social media ‘experts’ with a view on what will and will not generate revenue and offer value and produce returns. Everyone’s full of crap of course because there are no experts, no one knows what’s going to work and the whole space is a complete land-grab.
I have tried Twitter recently and it’s like the Wild West out there. I started some conversations and they’re carrying on. I have used Linkedin and I was able to create a network of almost two-hundred sixty connections. I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my twitter streams or my Linkedin network – yet. But I do know that, so far, almost everyone – has missed the point of these technologies. The point is the conversation.
The conversation is, for the first time, being shaped and determined by the customer not the provider. That was always the intention of the Social Media model – it’s very ‘Web2’. There’s a good argument that says ‘conversation doesn’t pay the rent’, but inevitably, new things take a while to figure out and I have the impression that the moment’s arrived. Or it’s at least arriving. There’s plenty of tech geekery around the subject and there are a load of experts professing to know all the answers, but there’s also a growing conversation. A movement. It has nothing to do with the people who think they know the answer to ‘Social Media Revenue Generation Models’. It’s just about the people – having the conversations and working it out for themselves and with each other. And from those conversations comes the revenue. Just as it always has?
