My thoughts on the #SMCLA event

Tuesday night I attended the Social Media Club LA Event. IT WAS A FUCKING BLAST. The real issue started when we discussed the mommy bloggers. Turns out we had one in the crowd. Things got heated, feelings were hurt and general yelling started. Several people got mad that the brands viewed them as a source of money and not a legitimate voice. What was shocking about it, was nothing that was being said was unknown to the crowd. It's not like we are the Social Media Luddite Newb what the fuck is this thing our kids do called the interwebs club?

This event sort of illustrated what I always question when I goto some of these events. Amidst all this Techno-utopian evangelism, I often wonder "We are here to make money right?". I love tech and Social Media and connecting and the social graph. However our work in it is to really connect to the broader audience and make them interested in our brands.

I really liked what Rob Frankel had to say, we don't have to be global brands. The power of the internet is everyone get's to weigh in on a brand. But is everyone even interesetd in your product to begin with? furthermore, is it worth it to spend money marketing to a broad group at the expense of another?

A few days ago, the blagowebospheres blew the fuck up over Obama's handling of the Pot question. If Obama hadn't brushed it off would he have been able to run in 2012? Obama, made his mark in social media, and here he is suddenly disregarding a very active social media community. Brand suicide right? actually apparently not, no one outside of Reddit and Digg seemed to care all that much. Truth is, Obama made the right choice for the TV audience, by throwing the social media audience under the train. One thing Obama does right is make the correct noises for the correct audiences.

The adage is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, well we have thousands of squeaky wheels. They are all of different sizes and we only have so much grease. So you know fuck a couple of you, it's not that we don't care. Truth is we didn't really "care" about you to begin with. We are trying to maximize profits for our brands. That's ok, we don't have to like you, and you know what you don't have to like us. I mean don't get me wrong, I would love to engage everyone is an uber positive awesome conversation about how much our brands love you so much. However at the end of the day, I don't have the fucking time or resources. So stop getting all pissed when I don't bend over backwards for you and buy someone else's products. Don't worry once we have used them up we will swing back around and adjust our campaign to bring you along.

The Social media space seems to have become such a large echo chamber I wonder if we have lost perspective of our scope and size? The fucking #skittles campaign is a great example it blew up on my twitters and my facebooks. But looking at Reddit a place where "tech forward" articles are usually posted, there were only two stories posted. Neither of which made it that far in voting. Apparently in a brand survey less then 1% of people had any clue that they had done anything. At what point have we spent so much time worrying about social marketing that we forget, most people don't use Facebook to connect to brands. They use it to connect to friends and family. You never see non social marketers / entrepreneurs circulating "how to get 50 twitter followers" articles. They just use it to talk to people.

We can be a powerful tool for a brand, but the internet wasn't created for us. It was created for the other people, we are trying to co-opt it. Sad fucking truth, and I believe we all know this. Not saying we are morons, just sometimes I wonder if we lose sight of our real role in the web.

If you would rather be a neo-utopian-techno-futurist there are many great non profit institutions I suggest you look into them.