“Quickly getting addicted to her Blackberry! Help!”
That brief blast from the past was featured in the Huffington Post’s article, Oldtweets Shows You Twitter Posts From 2006 That You’d NEVER See Today. It’s joined by 19 other tiny tales, each remarkably dated, discussing everything from what a great movie Snakes on a Plane was to pondering how anyone named Barack Hussein Obama could become President of the United States of America.
While the article’s good for a few laughs (some of which, it must be admitted, you’ll have to explain to the younger interns) there’s more value to be found in the questions it raises. Social media’s fast pace and global reach have a tendency to obscure the very real role platforms like Facebook and Twitter have in both recording our collective history and shaping our future.
The Exchange of Ideas
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, discusses how humanity is unique in one critical way. Unlike any other species on the planet, we become more prosperous as we become more populous. This is just not true for the rest of the animal world. Too many individuals tends to lead to catastrophic events, like over-consumption of resources that results in massive die offs. Humanity, however, seems to have sidestepped at least some of these consequences. That’s not to say we live in a perfect world, where no one suffers. However, the rates of suffering are significantly less than one would expect, minus one critical factor.
According to Ridley, the reason humanity thrives is because we’re adept at exchanging ideas. Individuals talk with each other, and through this conversation, each benefits, adapting what they’ve learned to best suit their own circumstances. The ability to exchange information allows people to specialize and work collaboratively with others who have different specializations to perform feats of creation no one individual could do alone.
What we’re seeing happen now, on social media platforms, is the escalation of the exchange of ideas to a speed never before possible in human history. We’re also seeing unprecedented feats of creative collaboration being used for everything from simple entertainment to social commentary to sweeping cultural change.
The exchange of ideas shapes everyone involved. Participants in the exchange, the audience to the exchange, and a tertiary level of people who may never even know the initial exchange happened, but find themselves facing a social or cultural environment suddenly different as new ideas become part of the collective understanding of what it means to be a human being on this planet right now.
Social Media and the Role of Branding
As brand managers, we need to be aware of the fact that these conversations are happening, and what role we take within them. Some brands are the equivalent of thought leaders, steering and shaping the conversations that surround them. Other brands are more passive, reacting to conversations they witness. That’s bad, frankly, but even worse are those organizations that remain almost willfully oblivious to the fact that these exchanges and resulting cultural changes are even happening. When these brands proceed as if the world they’ve always known has remained unchanged, they inevitably find themselves in the middle of social media firestorms.
It takes a certain amount of courage and faith in one’s leadership ability to look at your brand and assess, with objective eyes, how well you’re functioning in the current social media environment. Will your brand be tomorrow’s throwaway “ha-ha, remember when?” joke, or will you be central to the current conversation, participating in and benefiting from the exchange of ideas?
