Max Gladwell

…talk about Social Media Club. Just be sure it’s part of a transparent and authentic two-way conversation.

Social Media Club (SMC) met for the second time on Monday. The event took place at the headquarters of Mahalo, the human-powered search engine whose lunch Google and Knol are currently preparing to eat. More on this later.

SMC is a group of social media marketers, consultants, and entrepreneurs who get together to discuss this burgeoning market space. SMC “is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and for promoting media literacy.” This second meeting featured a panel of experts that was moderated by Jackie Peters, co-founder of Heavybag Media. The four-person panel included Brian Solis, who’s written a book on social media.

The panel touched on a number of topics, discussing Web 2.0 conversations and the sociology of the social web. But it basically felt like they were talking exclusively about Twitter. This could be because Twitter is the social media tool du jour or because there were two huge screens that displayed the event’s live Twitter stream. One of the panelists recounted how a Twitter reply got him featured in USA Today. Zappos and Comcast were brought up as Twitter case studies. Somehow, everything came back to Twitter. This might also have something to do with the direction social media is headed, at least as far as this panel was concerned.

One of the recurring issues or questions in social media is how it integrates with a company’s organizational structure. Marketing? PR? Customer service? Product management? VP? C-suite? What’s so interesting about this question, especially in the context of Max Gladwell, is that companies are confronting the same set of issues when it comes to sustainability and social responsibility (CSR). Who should own it? The ideal solution for both is that there would be a C-suite position devoted to each, where this individual works with all aspects of the company to most effectively deploy social media and CSR practices. So the answer is all of the above because social media and sustainability affect every part of an organization. In the absence of a Chief Social Media Officer, however, companies have to pick and choose. According to the panel, it’s gravitating toward customer service.

Comcast is held up as the pioneer. For those unaware, Comcast monitors conversations on the social web, such as through Twitter, so it can respond more quickly to outages and other customer complaints. The New York Times recently wrote about it. So companies are now encouraged to listen to the social web through so many different tools or channels in order to respond and engage and promote and put out fires. There are problems of scale for larger and/or more popular companies. According to a marketing exec at Facebook, the brand is featured in some 20,000 headlines every day. And that doesn’t include articles that simply mention Facebook (like we just did…twice).

The panel pointed out that companies are now outsourcing their listening to India, which filters and packages the results to make them more manageable. It seems to us that this particular meeting of the Social Media Club was really about brands listening and engaging in conversations for the purpose of customer service. Which means that the social web has basically created a huge, virtual suggestion box, where companies are better able to respond to complaints and criticisms or else celebrate their successes.

While customer service is important, it’s not the type of thing that gets us out of bed in the morning. The fact that companies are already outsourcing part of it to India speaks volumes about its future value. One of the SMC attendees mentioned that an IM program could get through several questions of a conversation before a human had to take over. It’s only a matter of time, it would seem, before computers are able to manufacture and maintain these conversations. Does this put authenticity and transparency at risk? Not if consumers never know the difference.

Alas, one member of the audience chimed in with the most important question of the night. What about the old adage, dating back to Web 1.0, that content is king? Where does that fit into this?

Thank you whomever you are.

We can’t recall, but members of the panel may have responded with something like “the conversation is king”, but this only makes sense in so far as it’s equally alliterative. In our humble opinion, quality content trumps everything. And the chief function of social media, in our humble opinion, is to more efficiently and equitably distribute content such that the best rises to the top and the worst never gets seen. And since good content will always be found, it behooves companies and brands to produce good content and to utilize the social web as channels of distribution.

Quality content can take many forms, from blogs to white papers, music, photos, and video. When we think of the ideal example of a brand creating its own content and using that to tell its own story, we reminisce about the old days of BMWFilms.com.

It was 2001, and BMW made a bold move in hiring top directors, including Guy Ritchie and Ang Lee, to shoot a series of short films featuring a young Clive Owen as the “Driver”. Initially, the shorts were distributed exclusively over the Web (later going to DVD). If we recall correctly, you had to download a special player and then download each of the films in what would be considered a painstaking process by today’s standards. Never mind if you didn’t have broadband. Despite these limitations, the “end results were staggering: the series had been viewed over 100 million times in four years and had changed the way products were advertised,” according to Wikipedia.

If BMW produced another series that was just as compelling today as these were in 2001, it would reach 100 million views in less than a year, and it would never go to DVD. That’s the big difference with the social web. You can’t help good content from getting distributed. You can’t stop it if you try. That’s more powerful, in our humble opinion, than the conversation because its the origin of the conversation. Whereas customer service is reactive, content is proactive. Whereas customer service can be outsourced, quality branded content can de facto only be produced by creative professionals.

Of course most companies don’t have BMW’s budget, but all companies have marketing budgets. It’s a matter of how they allocate them. We’ve said before that no matter what your core business happens to be, all companies are now also media companies. BMW realized this long ago. It was a car company that became a movie studio.

In Be a Beacon, we mentioned the story about a friend who was tasked to spend all sorts of VC money on advertising for a cell phone startup back in ’99. He said, “We could start a cell phone [print] magazine for the same amount of money, take all the best ad spots, and still make it a profitable venture.” While that may have been true, companies today can spend far less on a blog and other original content (sans the ads) and achieve even better results.

Take Comcast for example. The company is allocating customer service resources to Twitter and other conversational mediums. It might also divert marketing resources to original content. Comcast is in the business of cable TV and internet. So it might host a blog that focuses on its cable offering i.e. shows, channels, pay-per-view, VOD, HD, HBO, etc. Navigating 900 channels is daunting. A blog dedicated to helping you get the most out of your Comcast cable could be quite valuable for existing customers while helping to attract new ones. This is authentic value for its own sake, because a Time Warner subscriber can gain just as much value as a Comcast subscriber. But the more that that TW customer comes back to the Comcast blog, the more likely they’ll be to make the switch. So we’d opt to run a few less print ads and instead pay a blogger $50K per year to create quality content on a daily basis.

The bottom line is that content is king. It will always be king. And there can only be one king. Social media has simply solidified content’s position on the throne. Meanwhile, the conversation is already becoming commoditized, and PR folk who don’t wake up to the realities of social media, whether it’s content or conversation, will follow in the footsteps of travel agents in Web 1.0. Truth be told, we have very little use for PR folk. The media and the public now have direct access. You’re just getting in the way.

As for Google eating Mahalo’s lunch, it will ultimately come down to content. Provided Google doesn’t game its own search results, the best content will win.

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