Lost on the way to the Campfire

We stood by and watched ‘Social’ burn from afar.

Social media — the digital campfire we all sit around sharing stories about the cornucopia of “experiences” that have nourished our souls. It’s a community of listening and learning. It is beautiful. Oh, and warm too!

But it doesn’t exist.

Back in 2008 I was busy sneaking out of the MySpace office in London to attend Tuttle on a Friday. Even though I worked for the (only very nearly just about) biggest social network in the world I was inspired by the idea of communicating with consumers on the channels they favoured. This was increasingly not the one I worked for. We were discussing and forming what would be termed “social media”. It was beautiful.

It was about creating “a two way dialogue” between business and customer. We furiously championed Dell’s IdeaStorm (remember that?) and VitaminWater crowdsourced (remember that?) a new flavour of obesity exclusively through Facebook. We hailed a new dawn in community building and listening. Hell, in 2010 I even presented Microsoft Xbox with a slide that drew on my analogy of “osmosis” for the business/consumer relationship. God that was a beautiful slide.

Social was so hot. It became more than just a digital thing but a way an entire business should work. Every CEO would read Charlene Li’s ‘Open Leadership’ and finally… finally…. people would understand what we had been banging on about. Social was A Way Of Life. Social was beautiful.

But with so much promise, what was once beautiful — turned into bullshit. When we first started out championing social it was a push against the traditional ‘broadcast’ model of advertising. But very quickly, once brands had effectively infected the places where once only people dwelled; social media became just another channel. The bullshit term ‘Conversations’ was still banded around to describe instances where people talked about the same topic but in complete isolation. It was “good enough”. It was not beautiful.

Nowadays, we simply broadcast to an ever dwindling amount of people. Count our likes, fans, followers. Plan our content calendars. And when we can’t reach enough people — we pay to advertise our social posts. What an oximoron. Actually…. WTF?!

This is bullshit.

Social media hasn’t matured — it’s manured. Isn’t it time we accepted that we messed up and redefine what ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ “Social”. A platform is not social. “Social is a behaviour”. Lets stop broadcasting & advertising in social and go back to the ideals that we believed in the first place. It’s either this or just admit that this Stalin-like era of Social is not what we had hoped for and perhaps it’s time to kill it once and for all. It is over.