Social Media As a Multiple Disciplinary Medium

First of all - I'm excited that this group exists, because only with the collective mind will we nail a common way to approach and evaluate measurement and value, and to a degree the sooner the better, albeit it's not going to happen overnight.

What I find interesting is that very seldomly do you hear anyone mention what I think is a major benefit and complication point regarding social media - the intersection of multiple marketing discliplines - PR, content development and asset distribution research, consumer insights and product development, and yes advertising too. In this manner of multiple disciplinary potential, Social Media exhbits characteristics of a new medium albeit on the backbone of the internet. Hence one of the reasons why it has been so hard for agencies to figure out which groups "owns" social media, because it is not one existing group. Likewise when it comes to clients budgeting for social media. We will see a rise in social media roles at both the client and agency side, as we have already started to witness this past year. We've already seen aquisirtions by some of the agency holding companies like WPP of both the services firms (agencies) and technologies (monitoring solutions).

I'll start by saying that nobody has the answers of course - but the more we experiment and measure and monitor and attempt to assign coorelational value, the closer we'll get to something that makes sense fairly universally - if that's even possible.

Very often we focus only on the conversations, rather than the aggregate value of the impact of many forms of social media presence and activities, includng how other (more traditional) forms of digital and offline marketing are "activated" in social media, similar to search, but based on a different consumer mindset and purpose.

Of course the impact of influencials, conversations, WOM, the perception of brand advocacy, and the ability to glean insights from all of the above are the crux of the power of social media, there is also even more. While advertising is certainly not the main potential value of social media, I get so frustrated hearing from others that it is never about advertising or that marketers who dare ask what their return is just "don't get it" - tell that to MySpace's $1billion in ad sales this year. There's a merging of advertising and greater elements of marketing happening that allows careful marketers to become part of the media experience rather than a detractor (of course we've all seen far too many bad executions detract from the experience). The process is not as black & white as it is in other forms of digital media. When brands can establish a presence with a level of authenticity and transparency that allows for their personas to shine and establish a channel for the distribution of brand experience, there is a huge value in that.

Of course the conversational/WOM and monitoring & learning aspects are a vital component and posess a value that we are are trying now to define, because ultimatwely it all comes down to marketers understanding value and not guessing at it, even understanding it directionally versus absolutely. Meanwhile, most consumers don't have and will most likely never have that much interest in the vast majority of brands or products, therefore conversations will be at a minimum for most brands. Scale does have it's place here. Do we tell these brands that social media is not for them? Who decides that brands are worth talking about? Consumers of course. But having the right brand persona and assets to provide as part of the overall experience can move that along. That being said - there will still be many, many brands that are just not going to blip the radar enough on the conversational meter and reinventing a persona and creating assets to try and force the issue to consumers will never work.

I'm playing a little bit of devil's advocate here, but the moral of my rant is how much of a greay area there actually is...that it's about far more than just the conversational side of the equation, and the word "conversation" has become more of a buzzword than a lexicon that defines buzz.