Here’s an experiment: You are in a burning building. Smoke and fire alarms blaring everywhere. An emergency robot appears in front of you, emerging out of the smoke. “This way” it signals. Would you go?
I have always liked Seth Godin. He’s one of these people who is quick to understand the fundamental dynamic of a given situation, analyze it, extrapolate from it and then use it as a guideline to understand what needs to be done next. Plus, I like his irreverence and have a soft spot for his way of putting things.
Trust is emerging as the key requirement in the 21st century in making businesses succeed, marketing campaigns stick and brands thrive. Its lack has the exact opposite effect. It has been around since we were able to stand up on our hind legs and form roving bands of hunters (probably even before that) so why are we only now looking at it in detail?
The trouble with social media (if blame is to be apportioned at all) is exemplified by the heading of my article here. A more accurate description of what I will talk about would be: “Why Social Media is not a Channel for Selling” or perhaps, even better: “Social Media Usage and Human Economic Behavior” but none of these would be as strong and strong is what is required in order to make an article stand out sufficiently to be read.
It’s Monday morning and here I am, my thoughts and ideas being put together and shared for free. Why not? You may well ask. Why should this not be so? And I have a couple of answers there that might interest you. The first one is very much a 21st century, co-creationist, open-minded one: I think that the traditional way we calculate value is narrow-minded and outdated and we really ought to find fresh ways to do it. Ways that empower not just ourselves but those around us. This builds relationships (even if we are not aware of it), creates connections, unleashes the power of shared information and the shareability of its results and creates a fluid, evolving matrix that makes us all smarter, more capable and better informed than ever before in history.
“To Google” may have become a transitive verb for “using search to obtain information” but at some point in the future one of its variants will be a synonym for “think big and disrupt everything”. Ok, let’s unpack this statement to add a little substance to its style.
Do social media networks make us dumber? Do they make us smarter? Are they prisms that focus and magnify our worst attributes, turning us into a digital mob that launches global witch hunts in a single click? Do they have the ability to bring out the very best of us, helping the innate trust towards others that we have within us, emerge?
It’s true that when you’re at the top everyone wants to pull you down. This is the same for brands as it is for people and Google is no exception. Part of this is natural selection, you automatically become the ‘target’ to beat. As a trailblazer your achievements become the benchmark others measure themselves by.
When Google+ came along its remit was as obvious as its functionality was complex. It brought in individuals from the entire Google ecosystem and began, by degrees, to ascribe weight to their presence, expertise, connections, interactions and knowledge. It tuned profiles that used to be “strings” into people and entities that were proper “things”.
Technology and morality make for an uneven mix. There is always the feeling that we should agree on a Cartesian split, where we make the former the province of man and the latter can be ascribed to a higher authority (of some description) that we can safely ignore in our day to day lives.
