The Evolution of Marketing and Communication: How we've arrived at social media...

Social media didn't just happen. We've evolved into a culture that demands immediate, transparent, and authentic communication. We desire this not only with each other, but with the companies and brands with which we affiliate. Understanding how we arrived at this place, and how marketing and communication has evolved helps us understand the context as we move forward.

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KSL'ism - Twitter is like a hammer.

I'm teaching Social Media this summer and today in class we talked about Twitter. The students were not Twitter users, until today. I've found that many people have the same questions about tool.

• Why does anyone care that I did laundry last night?


• Why do I care that someone is making bread?


• Who has time for this stuff? I can barely keep up with email and Facebook.


• Does Twitter even matter?

To help them understand, I've developed another KSL'ism. (KSL'isms are what happens when I over simplify a situation and use an unlikely metaphor. Those of you who've worked with me are all too familiar. :o)

I explained that Twitter is like a hammer. One tool, with two very distinct purposes.

When you think of a hammer you probably think, like most people, that it's for driving nails. But a hammer has another job, the claw end of the hammer does significant work and shouldn't be overlooked. It can extract a nail driven deeply, with ease, exerting great leverage to pull it out of a tight binding.

Twitter is a tool much like that. Twitter is one way to drive your brand or push information. Every tweet, every link shared, every Re-Tweet, reflects and further defines your brand. But Twitter can be used to extract hyper-relevant pieces of information too. Information that might otherwise not have had the leverage, in the great online content world, to bubble up to a level of visibility that could be helpful. Without Twitter it would be very difficult to extract these pieces of information.

To demonstrate to class I typed into a Twitter search "Social Media" and "Business" or "Enterprise", selected only posts from within the past 24 hours, and only from people within 100 miles of Boston, people we could meet. Then we used google advance search to execute the query, without the location constraint b/c we can't do that easily there. Here's the results.

• Twitter stream
• Google results

Which do you think did a better job of extracting actionable content?

Keep the faith. -KSL

Potential Consequence of Accidental Eavesdropping

My heads spinning a little, the new Facebook feed has lent to some fantastic thoughts about the potential consequence of accidental eavesdropping. Yesterday a wall-to-wall conversation between two friends was brought to my attention in the Facebook stream. Something I would have previously not seen or thought about was now front and center in the middle of my screen.

Their conversation was about trading stock and who bought what, when, and other ideas about what to buy and why. It occurred to me at that moment 'what if they or other people were talking about things that I shouldn't know about?' (Enter images of Martha Stewart) I mean ImClone founder Sam Waksal, was arrested for informing friends and family to sell their stock, and attempting to sell his own. How many conversations on Facebook might equate to a similar to situation? What if I never meant to see it, but someone shared something they shouldn't have and now I know? Could I be trouble?

So I settle down and think that people "in-the-know" of that kind of insider information would surely be savvy enough to not post it on a social network and likely wouldn't even use email.

But then...I started to think about the speed at which information travels in these new platforms, specifically Facebook and Twitter. And about what kind of an effect that rapid information disbursement could have on the stock exchange. I mean who's to say some group couldn't just agree to buy company "X" stock one day - all within minutes of each other get the word out to buy,...and then sell six hours later after the price has jumped due to the high influx of interest. I imaged Bud Fox Tweeting "Blue Horse Shoe Loves Anacot Steel." and everyone in the Twitterspehere buying. At very least we have the makings of a great new version of Wall Street.