Image by Cromo

Lately Social Media has become a blooming trend and everyone seems to be an expert. The phenomenon seems interesting, but sometimes it sounds like an echo chamber of same thoughts and methods being tossed from one professional to another without thinking what’s behind it all. Even the same cases seem to go around.

This has made me think really hard what is Digital_Alpaca’s deal with social media. What does an Alpaca offer in this field, or does it? In order to get to this, I have to open up a little bit what are my ideas about social media as a whole.

Social Media isn’t Facebook

There seems to be a lot going around that social media is the services. I would like to disagree on this. Like guns, uniforms and military discipline are the visible characteristics of the army, the same are the social services to social media.

The real need behind it all is what counts. If  people weren’t scared and greedy, would we have an army? If people weren’t social; wanting to share, co-operate and socialize with other people, would we have the current outburst called social media?

So it’s more a paradigm shift…

People are changing the sandbox where to play. This is a core idea that television and newspaper companies should understand better: people are not there where they are anymore, they are more and more in the web and that’s it. It doesn’t matter how much you try to smear social media, they are still using it. It’s the same thing that it was with TV, but this time it is actually social.

This is how people, and more specifically some part of them, currently act. It’s not a new way of behaving, people are social in nature and being digitally social gives even those of us a bit more unsocial, a place to satisfy their needs and participate in something.

But what we as professionals who live and breather the social, have to understand that there are people, and most likely will still be in the future, who don’t understand what this hype about social media is and won’t ever be as intense part of it as we are. And how I would like to say that everyone should dive into this, I won’t.

When it comes to the services themselves, my hope is that they keep connecting people and support their natural behavior and maybe in the same time make this place called Earth a bit smaller and unite by familiarizing different people and cultures to each others. This of course is a thing we all should determine to improve with these tools.

…but please, not a religion…

I feel somewhat uneasy when people tend to talk about social media like it was a religion. In a way you can put some same elements to it, but anything can be a religion then, right?

Although I find social media interesting and have been using it even too intensely sometimes [how many services, I've already lost count], I don’t find the profound comfort in it, something that religion or a philosophic ideology can give to people.

It is more a platform to do things and there you may experience digitally things derived from the real life, even religion like in the case of Muxlim, a Muslim Lifestyle Network.

It in itself is nothing, just a context.

…and definitely not a shout box.

In these times when branding yourself seems to be the hottest thing, it seems rather unfortunate that there are people in the field that seem to think helping others and marketing themselves with filling all the services with their ‘help and thoughts’ is the same thing. This is just boring.

I would say create and share less, and do it with quality. For me it is obnoxious when the same face is filling all my feeds. In the end I just stop listening.

The information flood today is so huge that I don’t need 10 000 people shouting in my web accounts. This is also one thing that makes me question how useful it really is to have 10 000+ followers in services like Twitter. Does the amount really outrun quality and meaningful? You decide.

Intelligent Social Media

So back to the starting point, how Digital_Alpaca wants to be a part of social media?

After these kinds of thoughts it is obvious, that the first thing behind it all is intelligence. There’s no use to push social to places where it doesn’t really create value. It is urgent to see the silent patterns behind the visible: what is the goal that could be achieved with social media or is there one?

It is easy to get mixed up with the hype and not understand that there are still things in making business that are timeless and doesn’t look platforms where they are implemented. It is just how to get them in action. So more goal-oriented thinking in what’s the use of doing something and less on what is just cool.

Social Media as a phenomenon is a tough thing to take, because in a way it is finally an unpredictable place. Why? Because it is filled with people and they are in control. Same rules won’t apply as with the old media forms.

How much we would like to say people are predictable; people have tried to put other people in nices  boxes, never quite managing to do it.

It used to be easy to make assumptions like ‘who are our customers’, which after reading a couple of books like Buyology Martin Lindström I don’t even believe that much, but the target group thinking is even harder nowadays.

So yes, Alpaca is a part of social media and likes to tell other people about it too, but in a way that idea behind it all comes to visible. What’s the use to have neat new things if you don’t know how to use them, or even better, what they really can do and have changed?