The social media expert

"I am a social media expert" hea announced to no one in particular.

I tried hard to avoid him but as we were the only two people in the room it was hard to do so still I pretended to avoid him.

"I am going to start looking for clients now..." he said, "and teach them social Media."
It was hard to avoid him as he bobbled in front of me with too much agility, 'Social Media?' I looked at him, 'you know social Media?'
'Correction dude,' I am an expert on social Media. I today created two fan pages for my friends,' he beamed.

'Social Media is in dude, where are you?'
Clearly I was in an ancient Chinese torture chamber at the moment but he didn't know it... Yet.

'So what do you do in social Media?' I asked making a brave face.

'Its as simple as making bread butter toast...' he explained, I resisted reminding him that last time he burnt the toast and ate it pretending it to be brown bread, 'Open a twitter account and a Facebook page then keep following people and follow them back...Do you know there are 500 million active users...' he smiled wide.

'The 500 user count is as reassuring as well as discouraging dude... There are 140 crore billion people on the planet, no one actually bothered to listen to you except me...just because you see them does not mean they actually care about you. In fact a half of them actually are worried about you invading their privacy.' I corrected, 'Can you assure 500 million people that you are a good guy and make them trust you?' I asked simply.

'Err dude, even God has not managed to do that' he answered, 'What you say seems Impossible.'
'So making money from internet was impossible but Google became worlds largest company by selling keywords over the internet.'

'You mean...'
'Disturbing my peace can be hazardous to your mental health...' I replied coldly.

Can you think of how to turn likes into cash flow? Well I am no social media expert but considering the fact that minimum age for joining Facebook is 13, creating a Facebook page clearly is not a qualification to be one.

So what it? Do tell me before returns.

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The human social connection

When it comes to social media, people immediately jumped into conclusion about ROI, likes, facebook, metrices, IP address, sentiment analysis and many other 'keywords'. Ideally speaking, I believe all this is.... crap.

How can you measure a human thought? How can you stimulate the human thought? Social Media is all about passing a message through the human thought. Twitter, facebook or any other social network are just an extension to this thought.

Lets take two examples of the social connection,

My mother is a traditional house wife, who also has a facebook account. When it came to getting a bride for her son (sadly me) it took her exactly 24 hours to get in touch with 2 girls from distant Karnataka (my hometown)

In a social world this is fantastic, the social channels she used where simple telephone (that also a landline) and total 3 phone calls. The message spread like a wildfire. Here we need to note, getting a wife for her son is about her control over his destiny, which in term triggers a passion. The passion made her open the social channels. This passion is important. Another important example of Passion was the train robbery at Kakori. Ram Prasad Bismill and Ashfaqullah Khan planned to rob the train on Northern Railway lines near kakori. The message was passed to the revolutionaries and in the era where telephone was a privileged of only the white empire, this message was passed far and wide. Because, there was passion involved in it.

When it comes to business, we talk about system. A systematic approach of turning facebook 'Likes' into money. This systematic approach does not work on the social world. The social world is open, not hidden, where there are millions of judges, you cannot just enter the world blindly, because every 140 characters you speak are being judged by millions of people. The 140 characters are going to be modified, sarcastically commented and re-broadcasted.

We can take a great tip from the brilliant orator, Aristotle and his great teaching of 'The Art of Rhetoric', we can use the same principle in Social Media.

'The art of rhetoric' lies in 3 principles, called Ethos, pathos and logos.
1. Ethos is ethics, the reputation. Is your product or your message ethical? Do not mis-representing a fact? Ethos talks about you, the brand, the product. E.g., Google, Don't Be evil. They have great ethos.
2. Pathos is passion, appeal based on emotion. Does your message has passion in it? E.g., Apple, iPod made a big dent in the universe.
3. Logos is representation, the logical and systematic driven message. E.g., Microsoft Office, Software for people ready business.


The social channel exists even beyond facebook or twitter, it exist in office coffee machine, it exist on telephone, on SMS. Social Media is a way for the customer to contact you, not for you to contact the customer. Your message is the first way of contacting the customer, rest comes later.

Completely my view, what do you have to say?

Image source:
Img 1: http://elledecouture.com/2010/07/20/drinks-for-everyone/
Img 2: http://mssilveira.edublogs.org/2010/09/30/109/

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