Social exposes the product

The whole notion of social seems to make some leaders uneasy.

For a long time, it was acceptable to build a wall around your online presence and divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Much of internet ‘marketing’ was designed around pushing out a broadcast and converting it into page views and unique visits. It was a one-way numbers game, with very little to do with what real people needed.

That model is much harder to defend now. Almost everything people do online is social, or is being pulled in that direction: media, gaming, consumption, journalism, learning, television, discussion groups, forums, comments, fans, followers, tribes and interest groups. Technology enabled this change, but the interesting part is no longer technical. People are naturally drawn to other people with shared interests, questions and tastes.

If you ignore that shift, or see it and refuse to move, you risk becoming irrelevant without quite understanding why. This is not the kind of change a single business can opt out of. You can choose how to respond, but you do not get to vote on whether the change is happening.

Having a Twitter account or a Facebook page is not the same as understanding social. If you are not engaging in conversation, starting a movement, leading a community or joining one, you are probably confusing social with another RSS feed.

The uncomfortable part is that social makes you exposed. It removes some of the distance between the company and the people judging it. It encourages transparency, creates immediate feedback and leaves fewer places to hide.

That only looks like a problem if the work is mediocre. If the product is good, exposure helps. If the product is weak, exposure merely accelerates what people were going to find out anyway.

So when leaders are scared of social, the interesting question is what they are really scared of. My guess is that it is rarely the technology. It is the possibility that people will see the work clearly.