The new medium of social media demands a new voice – that’s clear. The medium is the message etc etc. And one way media – the tottering dinosaurs of print, TV, radio and even their more nimble descendents, websites and email – look more and more like the forced propaganda of a failing regime.
The new medium provides – demands – an immediacy and intimacy that was impossible in the old world of crafted monologues. From monologue we’ve moved into dialogue, and the buzz words around the new medium (transparency, honesty, relevance, value and commitment, according to iMedia) have the monologue crafters very nervous. If marketing is now an open ended conversation, who needs to pay for an agency’s careful, expensive craftsmanship, when all you have to do is wire up to a social network and talk talk talk.
But conversation is not as easy as it looks. In fact, it’s harder than monologue – the difference between setting up a perfect three point shot on an empty court and making that shot on the fly in the middle of a fast moving game.
There is no reason to think a company will be any better at ongoing conversation than they were at creating their own TV or radio spots, their own banners or emails or websites. Finding your company’s voice, sounding like yourself – i.e., sounding like the best qualities your brand has to offer – is no easy task. Ask anyone who’s tried to, say, write a memoir, or even a good holiday card: expressing yourself, telling your story effectively, is going to demand as much creativity and expertise in the new medium as it did in the old.
Again, it will if anything be harder, because conversation demands more nuance and speed than monologue.
There is a certain charm and sense of honesty in a beginner’s clumsiness – that was a large part of what drew people to early YouTube videos. But the arc on YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook, has been toward people who are good at it; people who understand the medium and express themselves well through it. The more that people get comfortable using social media, the more clear it will become that the nuance and intimacy – the authenticity – of the social media voice is something that has to be crafted.
John Thompson
Senior Copywriter, OTOi
http://www.otoi.com
