L&S Unscripted

My sister in-law picked a fight with me. No provocation. Just wound up and hit me with a big, nasty leather pillow. Highly unusual behavior from her. She’s a grandmother for cryin’ out loud. So I retaliated. Smacked her right in the Facebook. The Pillow Fight War of 2008 had begun.

Pillow Fight is a Facebook application that encourages…well, I’m not sure what it encourages. It may just be electronic silliness, but it got me thinking. What was originally the domain of the Millenials has quickly become a part of day to day interaction among those of us who have a little more life experience (or more than a little more).

The interesting thing is the difference in how we use it. Rather than a “here’s-what-I’m-experiencing-this-very-second” stream of consciousness, we treat it more like an electronic bulletin board. Or digital Post-It notes on a universal fridge.

Pictures of high school classmates at their kids’ weddings. Vacations. Reunions. Dog training tips. Birthday reminders. Lists of wines that go with beef jerky. And pillow fights, of course.

Makes me wonder how we’ll use it in thirty or forty years. Maybe something like this:

http://www.straightfrommybrain.com/pages/right/pensionbook.html

By the way, my official Facebook ranking is: Pillow Ninja.

Beware the night.

In a meeting yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment. As we’ve tried to help our clients make the leap to social media, too many times social media brainstorming is limited to banner ads on Myspace or Facebook. As marketers, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, so I say: take social media out of the list of marketing tactics… it doesn’t belong there. Really, it’s a paradigm shift in that the social nature of messaging is infused in everything we do online.

Virtually every type of digital marketing has or could have a social component changing each medium from a one-way form of communication to two-way communication stream. For example, we must understand online user behavior to be able to join the conversation. Going in blind simply doesn’t work. This act of online listening can be defined as participating in social media. Cross-linking is social media. Reading and writing blogs, ratings and reviews is social media. Digital PR is social media. I’ve even known certain e-mail campaigns to generate dialogue. And of course, we can build web applications that have social nature and application.

Don’t place Social Media as a line item within your marketing plan - that’s too limiting. Think big. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s simply the online world in which we live and play. Dive in.

Steadily socializing,

Robin