May08
21
A Necessary Dose Of Reality
I’ve just picked up on a fantastic post from one of my favourite bloggers, Lee LeFever from the Common Craft Show which is a must-read for all of us immersed in the Web 2.0 evolution.
I’ve often criticised advertising agencies of losing site of the bigger picture as a result of striving for bigger, flashier ads, edgier copy and design and of course, elusive awards. But Lee’s post has pointed my accusatory finger right back at me - do I have blinkers 2.0? Am I so worried about my traffic, Twitter replies and blog rankings that I’ve forgotten that the vast majority of my clients and their customers don’t know about, or don’t care about anything 2.0-ish.
Lee says, after returning from a trip to Las Vegas:
It’s too easy to start making assumptions - assumptions about general awareness, about the number of people who really know what’s happening in “our” online world. Viewed from the comfort of our living room, bookmarked pages and social circles, the Web looks pretty small and awareness looks pretty big…
But they haven’t. In real terms, no one has. I look at Las Vegas as a cross section of the US. At any moment there are people from every state and many countries. They are the General Public in a lot of ways. I sat back and asked myself - forgetting Common Craft - do these people know about Twitter? Has Flickr become part of their world? What about wikis, do they care? Are they using RSS readers? My completely anecdotal evidence says the answer is no. In our own little online world, it’s too easy to assume they do…
Our challenge, you included, is to remember that our web-based world can become a deceptive echo chamber. We may think we’re creating awareness and change, but until our work, our ideas can get outside the chamber and impact people walking around Las Vegas, I fear that we’re just talking to ourselves.
Wow. Lee hits the nail on the head, doesn’t he. And if he’s talking about the most developed nation in the world - the benchmark - how much more for us here in South Africa?
Is it possible that the modern Web’s greatest strength - it’s social, networked nature - is also it’s biggest weakness? All we land up doing on these sites, a lot of the time, is creating larger digital cliques. The critics of the 2.0 space in South Africa pick on this apparent fact more often than anything else - the barriers to entry are high for people needing and wanting to learn.
Fortunately people like Dave Duarte have made it their personal mission to offer top quality education and information about the substance and practice of Web 2.0 and social media, but what are you doing? How are you educating people? Or a more helpful question might be - does your time on the Web contribute more towards an inclusive space or a cliquey space?
I’ve been challenged by Lee’s post, I hope you have too.
When you take a clients entire target market into consideration, they can be reached through a variety of media. The percentage of that target market that can ONLY be reached through a “web 2.0″ strategy is still really small (which dictates the budget allocation).
What media strategists should be doing is understanding the dynamics of the information that is communicated by bloggers etc. Often the info is the same but the dynamics are different and as such the way the info is consumed and processed changes. Knowing the various engines of communication is just not good enough.
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Hey Mike, While I don’t want to turn this into yet another navel gazing session, I must add that your contribution to educating people about this has been remarkable in the way you simplify concepts, take them back to their value in real terms, and discard with hype for it’s own sake. This is why you get the work, and the trust, of top clients consistently. It’s a lesson lots of us in this space can take to heart.
I just read some stats about the use of social networking sites. Korea leads the way at 35% of the web population, USA has about 25% and the french are the lowest at 3%.
I agree with this comment, we’re all too close to the issue, the average person uses the web to save time and get things done. Many people I talk to have never heard of Facebook so forget about Twitter.
However just because agencies might be right about Facebook and Twitter, the web has changed the landscape for advertising. Once upon a time we needed advertising to tell us about new products, we don’t now we just do a search and find what we want. It’s a fundamental shift.