April, 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Last week a Twitter friend of mine, @hennartonline, wrote a nice blog piece about feeling constricted by all of the rules that folks are trying to impose on social media and how, frankly, it was making social media not that much fun. I’ve been thinking about her post for a week and it has reminded me of some work I did in my distant past. As a graduate student, studying art history, I wrote my thesis on Marcel Duchamp. An artist often thought to be outside the sphere of cultural and societal influence, his oeuvre is certainly singular. I didn’t accept the premise that he was completely beyond the sway of contemporary currents and argued that I saw echoes  of Bergsonian metaphysics and utopian anarchism in his work.

In my thesis I posited that much of his creative output was a response to the rejection of his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1911) from the 1912 Salon des Independants. At that time he’d been working in the Cubist style, consorting with other Cubists and had created what he thought was a Cubist painting. The arbiters of Cubist rectitude however felt differently and rejected “Nude” as outside of their definition of Cubism.

So, where am I going with this — a friend’s post, Duchamp and Cubism . . . ? @hennartonline experienced something akin to what Duchamp experienced — a conflict between arbiters (often self-appointed) and individuals. Social media, like Cubism was in its day, is disruptive. It is avant garde (though with 100s of millions of users SM’s avant gardism is waning) and undefined. It is this disruptiveness, and lack of definition that make it such a powerful tool. Users, both individual and corporate, work each day to define social media; and, as with all movements, there are the self-appointed rules-makers. Most of the rules are great, common sensical, and based in simple good manners. Others, though, are about how to blog, how to tweet, what’s acceptable, and what’s not. These rules go beyond the insistence of social etiquette and seek to define how people should “do social media” in order to be considered part of social media — just like there was a way to “do Cubism,” and it didn’t involve moving nude figures.

In an undefined space such as social media individuals and companies need to find their own way and interact with the medium and its participants in ways that meet their business and personal needs. How JetBlue uses social media and how @hennartonline uses it are wildly different and their needs and uses are different than those of the self appointed SM-guru or the stock trader looking to demonstrate his prowess. Through trial and error (hopefully not too many errors, but there will be some, we’re human) all participants in this movement should be able to find their audience, and generate positive outcomes for themselves and their network of followers, friends, contacts, and even the occasional nemesis, in the most open, imaginative, and personal style possible.

You can follow @hennartonline on Twitter.

Last weekend my family and I were on Cape Cod. We were getting together with friends and awaiting their arrival Friday evening when I set out for pizza and beer. The plan was to place the pizza order then head to the package store (for non-native Bostonians, package store, or packy, is a colloquialism for the place where you can buy beer, wine and spirits ) while the pizzas cooked to grab a six pack. The pizza joint was closed.

I sent a quick Tweet about off-season on Cape Cod:

As if I didn't know April was off-season.

I asked the guys in the package store where they got their pizza and they told me. I also received the following Tweet from The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce:

Now that's customer service!

Granted, this got to me the next morning, but it’s still a great example of customer service and a great example of using social media to reach your customers. I love the language. They acknowledge that they are late, but offer two ways to connect — Twitter and the toll-free number — for future questions. The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce is on top of their game, in my opinion, and using Twitter to great effect.  They show that they are open and available to help me and I commend them. Plenty of companies are doing this but when it’s a local chamber of commerce, in the off season, you know that this channel has reached a critical mass and is here to stay.

Hurtling into the future

This week I presented a late breaking bid for a job in partnership with a creative boutique. Though neither of us got the job (the client went with their soon-to-be-erstwhile-AOR) it was a good experience and laid the groundwork for future collaboration.

During the process we talked about the future on a macro scale in a string of emails. Based on this and other conversations I’ve had, the marketing, communications and PR industry is really on the cusp of something huge. I think the latest financial paroxysms and industry convulsions have opened the eyes of many folks — both clients and marketers — to the potential of working outside of the boundaries of the traditional agency system. Agency life has always been filled with freelancers, solo-practitioners and the like. It’s not a life for everybody and many people say, even now, “I need a full time job, I need the stability.” Stable marketing jobs is one of the funniest oxymorons in the world. As the latest shakeouts at shops prove, stability is a fiction.

Great talent now throngs the market, creating an enormous, virtual, open-source agency filled with folks who now see that the best way to go is your own way, in collaboration with others. Combine a shop like exUrban Inc. that covers brand strategy and production with a creative boutique and you’ve got a virtual agency, custom built for your needs at that time. You could call this model on-demand marketing. This is a good time for marketers, self-employed agency professionals, and the boutique agencies that are now popping up all over. I’m not sure how good it is for the giants (who will certainly persist, just in some as-yet-to-be-determined form). The future is now.

Tweeting

The past week has been a busy one at exUrban Inc. As a result I blew last week’s deadline for publishing to this blog. One thing that took a bunch of time was my effort to overcome my own social media anxiety. Now, I probably shouldn’t admit this in public, and certainly not to people who might be reading this blog in the interest of working with exUrban Inc. Yet, honesty is one of the traits on which I pride myself, and to be completely honest, social media can be mildly anxiety producing — though beyond the glow of my monitor, I’m not at all socially anxious.

For one, in the social media space, you are putting yourself out there on a daily basis, and let’s face it, we want people to like us and to like what we say, or write. Second, social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional in ways that are really remarkable. The personal becomes public, and the public is personal. Since I got onto Twitter before I started this company my tweets tend to be truly of the micro-blogging variety — observations about the world, weather, running, and some mention of my business when appropriate. I’m not one to put out constant tweets about my company because we’re still in start-up mode and though it’s possible to be a shameless self promoter on Twitter, and other social communities, that’s not my, or our, style (I’m exUrban Inc’s Twitterer, though I’m working on Nancy).

My general approach to social media is to be myself, to demonstrate a variety of interests, and over time expose enough of myself to the world (but not too much, I still do value privacy and will not put pictures of my kids into the public, for a totally personal example) that people will come to trust me and perhaps recommend me and/or look to work with me. I haven’t proven yet that this works, though I have recently met with a Twitter acquaintance in the real world and hope to meet with more in the future. 

Such meetings don’t need to be for my profit or theirs though connections initiated in the virtual space of a social media community yield interesting opportunities. It’s what happens when humans come together. One major thing to keep in mind is that what you are doing on places like Twitter is creating real relationships that require nurturing over time. Just as in the real world, you can’t have a relationship with everybody you know, but pick out some interesting folks with whom you are connected and work on building rapport. Be yourself. Be honest. Be polite and respectful of others (just like in the physical world). Put your picture on your accounts, let people know there is a person back there. Finally, remember that these things cannot be rushed and require effort. Be patient. Define what you want from the medium and work to achieve these goals by focusing on communication, sharing and openness.

Thanks to the folks I follow on Twitter for imparting these lessons to me.